Let's assume the following: - best practices regarding optimization (i.e. caching) are followed - no video or music downloads - not an overabundance of photos - site membership supported - members can register and pay for events with a simple custom shopping cart linked into PayPal website standard and IPN (Instant Payment Notifcation) - sql server access is optimized using stored procedures to reduce unneccessary rountrips - no text-searching or large catalog searcing - will need to support limited record-locking - presentation layer is done with ASP.Net AJAX and/or Silverlight Can anyone give me any numbers at all here regarding daily pageview counts or concurrent members online purchasing a small number of items? I'm trying to get a feel for when moving to a VPS or dedicated server might be an issue. I have an existing site that is setup like this. I haven't monitored the webstats all that much but as far as I know, site performance is not a problem. Maybe on a busy day we get a couple hundred pageviews and a couple dozen members purchasing our product and maybe two or three concurrent users. Now let's say we kick it up a notch. Maybe a several thousand pageviews a day along with a few dozen concurrent users. Assuming I've done everything on my end properly, will my DASP site scale. At what point might it choke? Doesn't anyone have any example sites on DASP that aren't trivial and can support the traffic levels I've described. Any help at all would be appreciated. Thanks.
We get that question a lot, and I'm afraid the answer is not very helpful and always the same; it depends. We host sites that get several thousand page views per minute and don't create so much as a ripple. We also host some sites that crash when one visitor is on them. It depends on what the site is doing, or trying to do. We can't predict bandwidth or resource use for any site because there are a million and one variables that contribute to those things. I can say that you have described a pretty low impact site. All other things being equal you wouldn't have any trouble here. If your only question was "Do I need a dedicated server for the site I've described?" the answer would definitely be 'no.'
Thanks mjp. Yes I know it depends, that is why I stated a list of assumptions. Your answer is actually quite helpful. You described my kicked-up site as "low-impact" and definitely not requiring a dedicated server. That gives me a base from which to do some projecting. For example, say my kicked-up site needs to scale by a factor 5 or 10 - thousands of page views per hour and maybe a 100 concurrent users. Seems like my DASP server should be able to handle this. If there are any readers of this post who could say something like "Our site is like the one you described and we generate up to X pageviews a hour with x number of concurrent users", I would love to hear from you. I want to get a feel for the kind of load that medium and high impact sites are handling well on DASP. I understand all the variables that mjp alluded to. A developer could do his job quite well and the site will still have scaling issues because after all this is a shared hosting enviroment and some other app(s) may be misbehaving. I get it but for this exercise, let's not worry about that. Thanks guys. I really apprecite it.
Generally speaking, other customer's applications will not affect yours. Each account runs in an isolated application pool, so if someone else's application crashes every 30 seconds, it isn't going to have a negative impact on your site.
Well you asked my question. I assume you are using DASP 'standard' package just like me, nothing 'commercial'. To answer your question, I had an ASP.NET app that had an algorithm in it that on occasion became quadratic and/or exponential (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation). When this happened, within a 10 minutes I got a "Validation of viewstate MAC failed" error, as outlined in this DASP post here: http://community.discountasp.net/showthread.php?p=38204#post38204 I solved this problem by streamlining the algorithm so it became more "linear". I'm glad to hear you can handle up to three or so concurrent users and several thousand page views a day at DASP. That sounds pretty good considering at DASP as a customer you are not buying a server, but a service. If you want 'Oracle type' performance of several thousand concurrent users and several hundred thousand hits a second or whatever, you have to buy some Big Iron hardware I think. BTW I learned something new reading this thread...PayPal has an web service API for programmers...I did not know that...I'll have to check it out.
