This is a comprehensive roundup of our patterns & practices performance guidance for the Microsoft platform.   I put it together based on customers looking for our performance guidance, but having a hard time finding it.  While you might come across a guide here or a How To there, it can be difficult to see the full map, including the breadth and depth of our performance guidance.   This is a simple map. organized by “guidance type” and topics

Performance “Blue Books”
Blue Books have played a strategic role in both shaping the platform and driving exponential customer success on the platform.   They’ve helped us find and share platform best practices, create mental models and conceptual frameworks, and create systems and approaches that scale success:  The following are the patterns & practices Blue Books for performance:

• Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications -  This guide covers Microsoft's recommended approach for implementing performance testing for Web applications. These provide steps for managing and conducting performance testing. For simplification and tangible results, they are broken down into activities with inputs, outputs, and steps. You can use the steps as a baseline or to help you evolve your own process.
• Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability – Customers have called this “The Performance Bible” for the Microsoft platform.  This guide provides end-to-end guidance for managing performance and scalability throughout your application life cycle to reduce risk and lower total cost of ownership. It provides a framework that organizes performance into a handful of prioritized categories where your choices heavily impact performance and scalability success.

For more information on patterns & practices Blue Books, see The Power of Blue Books for Platform Impact.

Performance Engineering (Design / Testing)
This is our body of prescriptive guidance for performance design and testing:

Topics
This is our body of prescriptive guidance for performance organized by performance topics:

Techniques for Performance Testing (A-Z)

• How To: Account for User Abandonment
• How To: Capacity Plan for Web Applications Using Transaction Cost Analysis
• How To: Capacity Plan for Web Applications Using Predictive Analysis
• How To: Consolidate Various Types of Performance Requirements and Testing Objectives
• How To: Correlate Dynamic Data in a Load Test Transaction
• How To: Evaluate Systems to Improve Performance Testing Effectiveness
• How To: Identify Functions Causing High CPU
• How To: Identify a Disk Performance Bottleneck Using SPA
• How To: Identify Performance Testing Objectives
• How To: Load Test Web Applications
• How To: Model Application Usage without Empirical Data
• How To: Model User Delays and Think Times
• How To: Model the User Experience from Web Server Logs
• How To: Model the Workload for Web Applications
• How To: Quantify End-User Response Time Goals
• How To: Stress Test Web Applications
• How To: Tune Performance of Web Applications

My Related Posts

• patterns & practices Catalog at a Glance
• patterns & practices Security Guidance Roundup
• The Power of Blue Books for Platform Impact