Load Testing BI Solutions - When?

This year I came across two very different BI projects which had the common non-functional requirement to prove that they would handle an expected spike in the report generation load. Funny enough, in both cases the project teams got very concerned and came up with wildly inaccurate predictions of how many concurrent users we should be testing for. In the first case the problem was with the perception of "thousands of users", while in the second, the team interpreted "monthly users" as "concurrent users". The annoying part was that in the first case the team planned on building an ultra-massively overcomplicated queuing system to handle those spikes, and in the second case they were thinking of completely scrapping the ad-hoc functionality in the solution and resorting to report extracts distributed by email. The unreasonable expectations of the load lead to bad design choices - this is why it is important to remain calm and first check whether there is a problem at all.