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web server capacity

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by beermonster

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I appreciate that it will in the main depend on the web site, but as a general rule of thumb how many simultaneous users should a web server support ?? The servers in question are IBM 6000R's with 4 x p3 xenon 700mhz processors and 2gb of ram, running 2000 advanced server and (obviously) IIS 5 - with the traffic shared between them via windows load balancing. The site uses a lot of asp, and pulls data from a local sql db (which does not appear to be a bottleneck). Both sql and web files are stored on exterior disks (IBM xp300 cabinets)via raid cards. the company want 6000 users to be able, all at once, to use the site with acceptable response times - but at the moment anything over 4000 is dying. If you can give some comments on the setup then that's great, but if not then a general rule of thumb based on your own experience would be appreciated..... The points will be shared amongst the best answers !!

8 replies

by jack republic

I am not sure that load balancing is working.
did you configure the dns to preform round robin? if you did you shouled check wether
the load is evenly distrebuted among the servers.

by beermonster

Thanks, but the load balancing is via nlb NOT dns ! And a monitor on both servers shows that they are both being hit the same.

by frobo

Hi,

my experince for such load is to implement an three tire modell. 1. tire is for loadbalancing, 2 tire are the Web-Server and the last one is the SQL Server. Each Web Server should work with a user load beetween 2000 and 3000 users, at the endyou need a failtolerance and theirfor you should take min 2 better 3 Servers for user Connection. The hardware U describe, 4 CPU 4 GB RAM should work fine, since the most amount is hold in Memory. Be carefull with the SP2 for w2k, their is an bug with the cache for User Sessions on the backend Server. This modell is aprooved with up to 10 Servers and 20000 Internet connections at a time.

regards

Frobo

by beermonster

Frobo,I'm not rejecting your answer, just trying to attract your attention. Please see my comments below the original question and post another answer, whatever you have time for would be great, I'll be give the points over then. : )

by beermonster

Frobo, Thanks for your help. Could you give me any details (article number etc) about the bug you mention ?? Also, what do you mean by the first tier doing the load balancing (IE what do you have running on the first tier) ??

by frobo

Hi BeerMonster,

the first tire is an Cisco-router with Loadbalancer, so connections from the Internet
are spread on Serverfarm. If the Load gets very heavy, so its enaugh to add more Servers
in the second tire. In youre environment the Winloadbalancer Service should be enaugh.

The Bug i described was happend in our'e Serverfarm (citrix),
we are running a Cluster for Fileservices in the backend.
With SP2 it happens, if one User dropps his connection the others are dropped too.
The Hotfix is not available in the moment, but should be announced in next time.
The The other issue is that if you have installed SP2 the parms for Client
connections (SMB) in the Severservice( 3 tire) and the workstationservice (2 tire)
are to small for a heavy load, this must be changed to larger values.
This must not happen in your'e Environment, so your'e not using fileservices
in an cluster. I would not recommend the changes, since your'e not having problems that way.

If it possible use not ODBC request to the Database(from 2 tire) on the SQL Server,
this must be translated by the SQL-Server and this could cause performance problems.
An other issue is that stored procedures for read access could use multipe processors,
but stored procedures for write access are only running on the system CPu (1. cpu).
This means optimize youre DB-design and programm, this could boost up to 1000% of youre performance.

hope it helps

regards

Frobo

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