Dual Server Setup

Gotta expand...

[woop01]

Our site has been growing a little faster than I would have thought and it looks like it’s time to go to multiple Windows 2000 servers for running IIS.

Do you guys know of any good resources for this process? I’ve tried a few search terms in Google but didn’t find anything descent (a.k.a. anything related to hosting is spammed out by SEOs).

Thanks,

[mack]

Perhaps you should do some reading on "routers" very often this topic will reveal a lot of answers related to the use of more thn one server on a single conection.

Mack.

[Filipe]

I suggest looking up the keywords "load balancing".

What you're going to end up having is a single router (basically a computer) that takes incoming requests and hands off the threads to multiple machines. There are probably things you can do on your own site, of course, to reduce the need to have another server.

1. Lay off heavy image use
2. Reduce the size of common downloads
3. Rethink CPU intensive tasks. I notice a lot of people have scheduled tasks checking for certain things every 5 - 30 minutes. Do as much as you can on an hourly/daily basis as possible. Weekly/Monthly if it's feasible with what you're doing.
4. Make sure it's the system and not the network that's struggling
5. Refine your database structure and queries

You can save a lot of money in the long run by making smart decisions in the design and infrastructure of your site.

[woop01]

Thanks for the input. We're server about 14 million hits (9 million page views) off of on Windows 2000 server right now and about 90% of those are ASP pages. Is that a somewhat reasonable threshold to start looking at load balancing or should I expect to get a lot more out of IIS?

[plumsauce]

If you were to ask this on the newsgroups,
the likely answers would be "it depends"

How complex is the asp?

Can you run part of the site on a subdomain
located on a second machine?

eg. img.example.com for images

Look for "wlbs" on msdn, windows load balancing service

Can you move to a 8 cpu box?
If you have the load, asp can use the cpu's,
which is better than load balancing if you
don't want to deal with the complexity.

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