Increasing web server performance

re: Increasing web server performance

Gavin — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:44:08 GMT

some good advice there. Just to note the Optimizing IIS performance link does not work. I'm currently working on an online portal that is growing quickly and am trying to anticipate future problems before I hit them. I just wondered what sort of hardware your running for MS SQL? I'm currently running SQL 2005 Enterprise on a 3Ghz Xeon with 2GB, and am not sure how much longer this will hold up. I've looked at clustering but If I've understood right SQL2005 only clusters for failover and not load balancing so I dont think there would be too much to gain.

re: Increasing web server performance

litheon — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:44:08 GMT

While anticipating future growth is a good idea it sounds like you're way too far ahead of yourself. If you are seeing peformance problems you'll definatley want to think about getting more RAM for your box before setting up another one and using load balancing. Make sure you have the SQL server configured to use an adequete amount of RAM as that will greatley increase the performance of the server.

re: Increasing web server performance

litheon — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:31:23 GMT

I've never really toyed around with machine.config, although I'm assuming you can put <cache> entries in there. If that's the case make sure you bump the amount of memory the application can use for caching up there, especially if the SQL server is on a separate box. At any given moment on mn.com there are about 3,000 cache entries that total up to about 200 MB.

I've also got our SQL server configured to take up just under 2 GB of RAM. With that configuration and a fair amount of database optimization the CPU on that box never exceeds 20% utilization, ever.

Also, if anyone has anything to add regarding performance please feel free to chime in. I'm always interested in ways to tweak settings so they're just right.

re: Increasing web server performance

xRiOT — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 04:40:16 GMT

Great article Litheon. Very helpful.

Do you have any suggestions on tuning the machine.config for best performance? The website I am working on at the moment is set up in an environment with two load balanced web servers, one SQL 2005 server (with a warm failover) and one supporting application server which each of the webservers talk to for their session state.

re: Increasing web server performance

uRBAN jAMAican — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:16:50 GMT

Albeit a mouthful to read, I went through it all and got some great insight to things I would have never conjured up myself. Thanks for posting.