When building an application, performance is an important consideration because the application must support a target number of users. Performance tuning for Web applications is more difficult than for traditional client/server applications because you can’t predict the number of users that your Web site will have to support (unless you use a login or filtering action to lock down your site). To facilitate Web-application-performance testing, Microsoft introduced a new tool called the Web Application Stress tool (formerly code-named Homer).

Mic...