Drew_Black - 7:09 pm on Sep 5, 2007 (gmt 0)

If you've got MSSQL installed on the same system you'll need to customize the memory settings SQL uses. SQL server will consume all available system memory over time if you let it. IIS and SQL server can coexist on the same system and be much faster than accesses over a 100 base t network. ADO using named pipes to the same server is faster than ODBC/SQLOLEDB over a LAN.

This is all very dependent on a number of hardware factors. If you're on a single processor/single core system you are better off splitting IIS and SQL to two different computers. If you have a multicore/multiprocessor system you should be able to have both coexist and perform well assuming your drives aren't a bottleneck. Websites should be on a different drive/array than the SQL databases.

Ideally you would have SQL databases, index files, log files and full-text indexes all on different drives/arrays. 4 drives/arrays for SQL and one for your website content and another one for the operating system and SQL Server Executables. (Six drives/arrays total.) This isn't possible on many systems which will force you to go the multiple server route.

However, with 10k uniques per day you should be able to configure a single server to handle this kind of load assuming all 10k don't access the server in the same hour.

There are some excellent MSDN Technet articles out there about using Performance Analyzer to figure out what hardware resource is blocking your server from performing quickly. I used to run a quad Pentium Pro 200 MHz Compaq server with three drive arrays and handle 30k uniques per day on IIS5 running ASP.