How to buy an effective dot net ASP.net web sever (IIS and MS Access) ?
We will go with IIS 6 with the new web server if it is required.
We currently use the latest dot net, asp.net and I think the original iis 5
on a pentium 1.2 GHZ and 1 MB RAM and Access 2002.
Our Database queries are extremely slow, (the programmer can't change this)
and they take between 2 - 15 seconds to load a data heavy page, (tested for
one person running locally on the web server) //local host
We would like to scale to 100-200 simultaneous users of the Access database.
(I know, I know MS Access is not the best choice, but it was made and
probably because it was easy to implement)
What do you advise will give us much more speed?
a) more processors (I think it is a dual capable)
b) more memory 2 GB RAM from 1 GB...
c) ...
Or give up this beast, and buy a new one. We are prepared to do this.
thanks,
Dan V.
Dan V. - 07 Jul 2005 19:46 GMT
More details:
It is a Dell Poweredge 1500SC running Windows 2000 server, and use dot net,
asp.net and iis 5 on a Pentium 1266 MHZ (dual capable I think- one processor
in now) and 1 GB RAM and Access 2002. There is 460 MB free on the C:
partition and plenty on the D: drive.
> How to buy an effective dot net ASP.net web sever (IIS and MS Access) ?
> We will go with IIS 6 with the new web server if it is required.
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
> thanks,
> Dan V.
john conwell - 08 Jul 2005 23:35 GMT
I'd look at the code before i spent a ton of money on a new server. Does the
page use data binding? if so, rip that out. its a huge perf hog.
also, think about restructuring your pages. web interfaces are meant to
give high level data, or chunked data. Too many times i've seen people write
a page that spits out 2000 rows of info. try to implement paging instead.
also, try moving your access db off the server and test that out as well.
that way your IIS process and access process arent competing for the same
single proc.
These are a few ideas.
> How to buy an effective dot net ASP.net web sever (IIS and MS Access) ?
> We will go with IIS 6 with the new web server if it is required.
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
> thanks,
> Dan V.
Michael Pearson - 14 Jul 2005 00:15 GMT
MSAccess for 100-200 simultaneous users?
I'm not sure that MSAccess will scale to that high of a volume. Generally,
10 concurrent users is the magic number with Access. So, I'd probably not
go more than 100 simultaneous users. At that point, you really need to move
to SQL Server. I suspect that as you approch 150+ users, you are going to
run into some serious performance issues, if not database corruption issues.
As far as your hardware, determine where your bottlenecks are, and spend
money on that item(s).
Load up perfmon, and add % Processor Time, Average Disks Queue length (for
each drive that you use, don't use the "total" one). Look at those
counters. If CPU is generally really high or maxed out, consider replacing
the CPU. If the disk queue is above 2.0 for more than a few seconds at a
time, consider adding more / faster drives.
I don't have an easy way to tell you to monitor memory useage, but you can
use Task Manager to monitor that reasonably well.
IMHO, all apps should be developed on MSDE, and then upsized to SQL Server
as the load demands. That way, your upgrade is a simple backup and restore.
There's absolutly no code changing needed, only a connection string change
possibly.
Michael
> How to buy an effective dot net ASP.net web sever (IIS and MS Access) ?
> We will go with IIS 6 with the new web server if it is required.
[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]
> thanks,
> Dan V.
Robbe Morris [C# MVP] - 14 Jul 2005 00:31 GMT
Your existing server can more than handle the load.
Your el' numero uno problem is that you are using
Microsoft Access. It will "not" scale to that many
concurrent users and act reliably.
You could easily upgrade to SQL Server Standard Edition
and run it on the same box if you don't want to buy a second one.
A couple of years ago, we had 30,000 users a day on a
server not as powerful as the one you have now. The
server barely batted an eyelash...

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> How to buy an effective dot net ASP.net web sever (IIS and MS Access) ?
> We will go with IIS 6 with the new web server if it is required.
[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]
> thanks,
> Dan V.