Question

IIS 6, dynamic ASP pages, slows down with 10+ users, CPU too high ?

Asked by: JReam

We have a IIS 6 Win2K3 Server.  Nice new Dell Poweredge, good 3.0 dual core Intel processor, 2GB memory, etc.  We have one website with just a few .asp pages. vbScript is the default, mostly server-side, some client-side, good use of client side cookies (variables) with zero use of session variables.   Our website is very dynamic in nature since each internet visitor is getting a unique 'survey', a series of pages individually crafted on the fly.    Our CPU starts to run at 90%+ after about the 10th concurrent visitor, and slows the page to page response to a crawl for everyone.  It's not the bandwidth, not the NIC, or memory.  A look at Task manager shows the high CPU process w3wp.exe.   Even one visitor, we see CPU spike at 50% for a split second.    

We investigated .net (.aspx) pages, but the big bang there is mostly caching performance, which really does little for us, since no two pages are alike.   Our testing of some .aspx converted files/functions even caused CPU 90% with even fewer visitors.  We're not sure if .aspx is worth our attention, at least for now while we're looking for a quicker speed fix.

We investigated our website application itself, looking for obvious design flaws.  Then we tried a simple asp test that produced a bunch of dymanic text, and saw that this page also caused high CPU.  This leads us to believe that the ASP engine (if I'm saying that right) is generally slow under stress on our server.

We investigated VB DLL Com, but saw similar results.

We investigated the IIS 6.0 App Pools, but that does not apply since we only have one website.

We investigated the Web Garden, and Worker Processes.  We read a few help sites that said to leave this alone, ie leave settings at one worker process.  Therefore we are hesitent to mess with this area.

At this point, we're not sure what to do.  We anticipate a occasional max of about 50 or 100 concurrent visitors.   My common sense would normally tell me that 50, or even just 10 visitors, should not bog down  the server/cpu, but it's happening.

I don't know where to look next.     I know that whatever our next steps will be, they'll be time consuming, so I'm hoping to get some help on what direction to go which hopefully leads to better  performance on the server.     Help.



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Asked On
2007-07-03 at 13:25:55ID22673899
Tags

iis

,

slow

,

asp

,

6

Topics

Microsoft IIS Web Server

,

Active Server Pages (ASP)

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: WMIFPosted on 2007-07-03 at 14:07:47ID: 19414810

what kind of stuff is the code of your asp pages doing?  it could be from less than perfect coding taking up more than needed resources.

 

by: JReamPosted on 2007-07-03 at 15:05:39ID: 19415145

We initially thought is was our code, and still haven't ruled that out.  Our code does access a SQL DB (on another server),  which is required to figure out the dynamic content required for the current visitor.    We are a seasoned SQL shop, and all of our SQL queries are efficent, ie. no wasteful Select * queries, etc.

That's why we tried that simple asp test I mentioned my opening post.  This test.asp only produced a bunch of dymanic text, no SQL at all, and we saw similar CPU percentages.  Test.asp was something real basic like, For x = 1 to 1000: Response.Write x & " Hello World <BR> ": Next.

 

by: WMIFPosted on 2007-07-03 at 15:23:14ID: 19415225

i see.  i misunderstood the page when you described it in your first post.  that kind of test will surely load the cpu though.  it is trying to get that done as fast as possible.  i am not too familiar with iis itself.  i followed this link from the asp section.

 

by: kevp75Posted on 2007-07-03 at 21:04:03ID: 19416478

I would look for the opening and closing of your recordset objects and conections.   Even one constantly open connection can dcause the hit you mention.

 

by: JagCPosted on 2007-07-06 at 04:33:08ID: 19430849

Aye. As kevp75 said often DB connections cause the probs.

One project I was on had an SSI at the top and bottom of every page. The top one opened a DB connectiona and the bottom one closed it. Sometimes over 1000 lines of code was executed while the database was open - and sometimes the DB wasn't even used...

The reason this can cause probs is that the server processes all clients round robin stylee. Each connected client may only get 4 or so lines of code executed before the server moves on to the next.

So if you have 10 people connected on a page with 100 lines of code between open and closes the server WONT open, execute 100 lines and close for each. It will open, do a few for each connected client and keep going round until it reaches a close. So it will actually execute more like 1000 lines of code before the connection is closed. So a page with 500 lines of code between connect/disconnect be viewed by 100 people means that 50,000 lines of code are executed before the connection is closed.

Not good. However, this may not be the problem but it's worth checking if you haven't already.

Another possibility.

I had a couple of particularly slow pages once in a couple of reports I had written for some web app. I changed the response.buffer to the one it wasn't (can't remember if it went from true to false or vice versa) but the page loaded a lot quicker. I suspect this was because it was a fairly large page and the server was buffering it all instead of getting rid of it.

So it may be worth checking out the response.buffer command (set it to false to dump directly to the client).

BTW, I'm a classic ASP coder so I'm not sure how to manipulate stuff in .NET but it may help :)

Good luck




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