Last night I started stress testing my component, CodeHighlight, just to make sure it performs well under heavy-load, but to my amazement it seemed to bring my beats of a machine to a stall. This happened when running the test in ACT, with 10 concurrent browser connections; everything worked fine for the first 30 seconds, the RPS peaked at around 90 or so and it didn't throw any errors at all, but then all of sudden it seemed to run out of memory or something. Because the entire thing suddenly choked completely.
At first I thought there problem was with my component, so I ended up working on it for about 6 hours trying to improve performance (lots of caching and so on.), but no matter what I did, it didn't help! Then a friend suggested that I should try to isolate the problem, by commenting out more and more sections of the component... To my amazement after commenting out the entire component of the test page, I still experienced the same behavior! This is in my mind very strange, because my machine is P4 2,4 GHz with 512 MB DDR 333 Mhz.
I've also tested it on my Windows Server 2003 box and the same happens there, even with just an empty page that does nothing at all.
Is this normal? In my mind it is not!