I am running an ASP.NET 3/Silverlight 3 site on one of the Windows 2008/IIS 7 machines; the site also uses a web service which connects to a SQL Server 2005 machine. In general, when the user gets to the main page of the application there is a database query that might amount to about 150k worth of data; then there is very little access thereafter - since most of the remaining activity is local to the user running the silverlight app local on their machine. After what might amount to an hour or so, there is an upload from the user to the database of maybe 10k. So my question is, is there any way to determine how many users of this type could be connected to the server machine at any one time? How would I know to change my plan or switch to a more powerful configuration? Many thanks
There is not any way to really estimate how much traffic a site can support. There are too many variables, and most of them have to do with the behavior of your application. What you are describing sounds pretty low impact, but every application is different, so any kind of estimate amounts to a wild guess. One site may be able to easily accommodate hundreds of users at any given time, another may fail with two users. There is not another plan to switch to if you find yourself running into problems. We can provide more bandwidth, but we cannot provide additional server resources (assuming your site is running on a Windows 2008/IIS 7 server).
