More on WebFarms and WebGardening in ASP.NET
Had a short conversation over email and John Lam had this to offer around Web Gardens. I checked with Corillian's scalability labs and heard that we have found similar results (we recently more than doubled our previous scalability numbers.)
Web gardens look interesting at first, but I spent a lot of time talking with folks at MS about web gardens and the consensus is that web gardens are only useful on very large SMP boxes – 16-way and up. The reason why is that IIS’s sweet spot is on 4-8 proc boxes. By using web gardens on large (>16 proc) SMP boxes and affinitizing CPU’s, you can make IIS think it’s running on a 4-8 proc box when in fact it’s running on a much larger box.
Fantastic information for anyone who's been disappointed with 16 proc IIS performance or for the two-proc folks who are thinking of adding horsepower.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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Can you tell me how/if Web Gardening would help in this scenario? The application makes use of Session, but not Application or Cache. It is drawing data from a separate tier(server) that is handling the caching.
There is only one aspnet_wp running on the box, though I know there are two physical CPU, and four virtual CPU because of hyperthreading. Should I make the config change to implement Web Gardening? Does that give me two, or four aspnet_wp processes?
I don't have a dual-cpu machine laying around to experience it myself with...
Thanks,
Travis