The purpose of the Baseline Performance Report is to examine the performance of system with a single user in order to determine its performance when not under load. A great deal of the time web-based applications do not meet performance requirements with even a single user because the web page load times are not objectively measured.
The Analysis Summary gives an overall summary of the report's findings from the two other major sections which look at Performance Goals and Bandwidth Estimates.
The Bandwidth report gives estimated values for the minimum and maximum bandwidth needed by the hosting company to support the specified number of users. It is a good place to start when planning the bandwidth that will be required to perform the load test, and for capacity planning with the web hosting company. Of course, once a load test is performed real bandwidth data will be available.
The Goals section shows how many of the web pages will be estimated to meet or fail the performance goals given the test parameters. Of course these are just estimates and an actual load test will need to be run to get definitive answers. One of the most common sources of performance problems with web pages is designing the pages on a LAN with virtual unlimited bandwidth, which leads to large page sizes. When the pages are then viewed over a WAN, which is bandwidth limited, the pages can be much slower to view. This report uses the simulated bandwidth described in the Load Test Configuration Editor to estimate the effects of limited bandwidth on page load times.