Performance Testing Data Driven Website

As an MCT for a CTEC, I'll get some pretty insane questions from sales people looking to help out local companies to help drum up business.  One of the all time greats was a company that wasn't sure that ASP and SQL Server could meet their needs for a “high demand” website because they were experiencing extreme slowdowns.  In fact, things were so bad that they would stop taking orders for hours at a time to let ASP “catch up.”  The high demand site?  They were taking ticket orders online for a play.  They had a total of 30,000 total tickets to sell and they were selling about 100 an hour.  Ok, so something is seriously wrong with their code I figure.  What someone could possibly do to drive SQL Server and ASP to below 2 requests per second I had no idea.  So the sales guy goes and visits the center to talk about me coming in and doing some ASP training for these people.

Now, keep in mind when a sales person is able to diagnose a problem you are in a whole world of trouble.  The problem that the sales guy had staring him in the face?  They had hooked up a printer to the website.  As orders came in, they printed them out.  And ASP was waiting for the print jobs to finish.  The thing that was keeping the website down for hours at a time?  Ran out of paper.