Hi, I am in the process of developing a small application that sits in 
the task bar and at a set interval polls an IIS web server for 
information. The process involves the client sending anything between 3 
and 30 characters of data and the server returning anything up to 50 
characters of data.

I am at the stage where I need to determine the overhead of running such 
an application. I can assess the CPU and Memory overhead on the client 
and server, but I also need to identify the overhead on the network so I 
can determine the network utilisation of the application. The sort of 
questions I need to be able to answer are:

1. Determine where bottlenecks exist (i.e - IIS processing versus 
Network bandwidth)
2. The overall network overhead for a single client polling the server 
once, including Ethernet overhead packets.
3. Determine the data payload of a single transaction
4. Determine the maximum number of synchronous transactions that the IIS 
server can process before reaching breaking point

I would be grateful for any advice you can offer to help devise a 
process for testing an applications network utilisation requirements 
along with any network monitoring tool recommendations you may have.

Thanks in advance,

Regards,
Mark.