Question

Recommended ASP.Net web-server hardware platform

Asked by: FVDW

Dear Experts,

At the moment we're developing an ASP.Net website that will need to handle in the region of a 1000,000 hits a day. In addtion to this, the website will most likely be developed in ASP.Net 2.0.  What would be the most suitable cost-effective server platform?

What we had in mind was a dual Xeon processor, with 1Gb or Ram. Should one look at 64-bit processors such as the Xeon or Optetron? As far as I know Windows 2003 64-bit should only be available from mid 2005. Is this the case? Otherwise one might consider hosting on Linux by making use of Mono and Apache. Are there definite advantages to hosing on Linux in this case?

In short, I have very little experienced concerning server hardware, and at the moment I'm at a loss as to the most suitable processor/ OS configuration. I would sincerely appreciate any advice.

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Asked On
2004-12-09 at 12:53:40ID21237041
Tags

hardware

,

server

,

web

,

2003

Topic

Web Servers

Participating Experts
1
Points
250
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: humeniukPosted on 2004-12-09 at 13:12:20ID: 12787451

Linux/Apache is a great hosting platform, but if you're going to be using ASP.NET, you would probably be better off using Windows 2003 Server.  If this will be a dedicated web server, you can consider using Web Edition (see www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/features/compareeditions.mspx for a comparison).

In terms of hardware, bandwidth, etc., it's hard to evaluate requirements without more info.  Also, did you mean 1,000,000 hits or 100,000 hits per day?  How dense will your pages be - do you know how many visitors to expect or page views (both are more relevant than 'hits').  You can take a look at www.csgnetwork.com/servbwreqcalc.html for a general estimate of bandwidth requirements.

 

by: FVDWPosted on 2004-12-09 at 23:47:25ID: 12790423

Thanks humeniuk,

Wel, we're looking at running say 1000 asp.net websites with an average of 1000 hits per day (totals to 1000,000). These websites rely heavily on MySQL database access for functioning. Average page size I would say is around 50kb, which means we're looking at about 50gb of traffic a day. It almost sounds impossible. If we assume that most browsing will be done during office hours, we need to generate a website every 0.02 seconds.

Question, why are the number of visitors more important than the page hits? Assume 1000 sites, each with 100 viewers per day and 10 views by each user.

I hope this will clarify the matter a bit. Thank you  for the help.

 

by: FVDWPosted on 2004-12-10 at 07:05:17ID: 12792756

Does Windows 2003 Web Edition support DP Xeon Hyperthreaded CPU's? In other words, does 2 Xeon Processors count as 2 or 4 CPU's?

 

by: humeniukPosted on 2004-12-10 at 08:06:21ID: 12793515

"Question, why are the number of visitors more important than the page hits?"
A 'hit' is a fairly vague term.  One visitor looking at one page can be a different number of hits, depending on the content (etc) of you website.  Your projection above is incorrect.  1000 websites x 1000 page views (not hits) x 50kb is approx 50GB of traffic.  Your second example, 1000 sites x 100 visitors x 10 page views = 1,000,000 page views, not 1,000,000 hits.

"Does Windows 2003 Web Edition support DP Xeon Hyperthreaded CPU's? In other words, does 2 Xeon Processors count as 2 or 4 CPU's?"
I'm not sure of the answer to that, but that may be moot, because for this kind of workload, you shouldn't use Web Edition.  You probably want to go with Enterprise Edition at least as you may want to consider a server cluster.  You should at least go with dedicated web & database servers, I think.  You're also going to need LOTS of bandwidth for peak times.

 

by: FVDWPosted on 2004-12-23 at 05:55:34ID: 12892194

Thank you Humeniuk,

I appreciate your recommendations.

 

by: humeniukPosted on 2004-12-23 at 05:58:32ID: 12892221

Glad to be able to help out.  Thanks for the A.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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