I'm probably missing something obvious here, but I've run out of ideas.

I have an Asynchronous Handler that works fine and dandy when there are no delays.  In a load test sample, I was able sustain 600 requests/second during a 5 minute test.  If I add a Thread.Sleep or even a Database call and do a WAIT FOR delay of 2 seconds, where the async processing is supposed to occur, my requests/second plummets to 5/second.

 I am using the VS2008 load testing tool with a simulation of 25 users and a sample rate of 5 seconds.

 

What am i missing?  does the performance really go down by 100x when introducing some kind of delay?

 

thanks for any help!!

 

-josh