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Can .NET Really Scale?
swordfish asks: "Does anyone have first hand experience with scaling .NET to support 100+ concurrent requests on a decent 2-4 CPU box with web services? I'm not talking a cluster of 10 dual CPU systems, but a single system. the obvious answer is 'buy more systems', but what if your customer says I only have 20K budgeted for the year. No matter what Slashdot readers say about buying more boxes, try telling that to your client, who can't afford anything more. I'm sure some of you will think, 'what are you smoking?' But the reality of current economics means 50K on a server for small companies is a huge investment. One could argue 5 cheap systems for 3K each could support that kind of load, but I haven't seen it, so inquiring minds want to know!"
"Ok, I've heard from different people as to whether or not .NET scales well and I've been working with it for the last 7 months. So far from what I can tell it's very tough to scale for a couple of different reasons.
- currently there isn't a mature messaging server and MSMQ is not appropriate for high load messaging platform.
- SOAP is too damn heavy weight to scale well beyond 60 concurrent requests for a single CPU 3ghz system.
- SQL Server doesn't support C# triggers or a way to embed C# applications within the database
- The through put of SQL Server is still around 200 concurrent requests for a single or dual CPU box. I've read the posts about Transaction Processing Council, but get real, who can afford to spend 6 million on a 64 CPU box?
- the clients we target are small-ish, so they can't spend more than 30-50K on a server. so where does that leave you in terms of scalability
- I've been been running benchmarks with dynamic code that does quite a bit of reflection and the performance doesn't impress me.
- I've also compared the performance of a static ASP/HTML page to webservice page and the throughput goes from 150-200 to about 10-20 on a 2.4-2.6Ghz system
- to get good through put with SQL Server you have to use async calls, but what if you have to do sync calls? From what I've seen the performance isn't great (it's ok) and I don't like the idea of setting up partitions. Sure, you can put mirrored raid on all the DB servers, but that doesn't help me if a partition goes down and the data is no longer available.
- I asked a MS SQL Server DBA about real-time replication across multiple servers and his remark was "it doesn't work, don't use it."
... but Unix/Java programmers aren't. Wanting to write the code for free, too?
Apache, FreeBSD and a cluster of 10 or so $1k servers and a nice DB server running PostgreSQL.
Works for me.
It's a damn simple question: can .NET really scale?
.NET, I advise you to keep your mouth shut. The signal/noise ratio is bad enough already.
Why on earth did you bring open source into it? If the man wanted to know about Linux & BSD, he would've asked.
If you don't have any experience with the scalability of
My first inclination is to recommend throwing that $20k at an ASP that can provide the server infrastructure to give you support for 100 concurrent connections.
Barring that, my recommendation would be to split the web front end and database, spending about $10k on each (using dell or hpq). I can almost gaurantee that you aren't going to get 100 concurrent connections for less that $80k to $100k without doing some sort of load distribution. If you strip down the amount of dynamic content and say script a refresh of a static page, you might be able to do it, but we don't really know what the app is going to be doing.
Jerry
A) This consultant, it sounds like, is largely or exclusively MS. He's not going to suggest Open Source software to his client because that will mean a loss in business. You can hardly blame him; you gotta go with what you know.
B) Oftentimes a commercial solution to some problems exists where a free one does not. The cost of development and maintanance means that the balance is not strictly in terms of free and non-free; after all, your developers' time costs quite a bit as well and home-grown or open source solutions may need more time taken in administration.
This is a pretty complex issue; different analyses have been done with different results. I myself am partial to Open Source, but this does not mean that the obvious answer is, "Hey, go Open Source! It's free!" Get real.
This entire story is lacking units.. I am so confused, it is like this...
"I bought a 400 car from my dealer, who said it could go 0-1200 in 57, but I talked to an auto mechanic and he said that the rpm throttled at 4.5 billion, so I don't know if I should get a turbo charger which would at least boost the speed to 1295!!"
If you are talking about 100 concurrent request per second: Any DB worth its salt should handle that IFF the database queries aren't too complex. If they are, your schemas suck. This is doubly true on a 3 GHz machine.
2. SOAP is too damn heavy weight to scale well beyond 60 concurrent requests for a single CPU 3ghz system.
.NET specifically, but just SOAP in general. Make sure you separate out the platform from the product. Saying web services with SOAP won't work is a long way away from saying .NET doesn't scale.
.NET languages, but that's rarely going to be a way to make your system run faster and scale more. Plus, I'm confused - what's your alternative? What database are you going to recommend that allows you to embed C# (C++, whatever) programs in the database itself?
.NET question, it's an SQL question.
.NET, or just a particular product. You might go with .NET and not use MS SQL Server, for that matter.
It doesn't sound like you're talking about
3. SQL Server doesn't support C# triggers or a way to embed C# applications within the database
Embedding applications in the database violates basic scaling principals: you need to separate out into n-tier, right? You don't want the database server doing anything but serving databases. Now, having said that, Yukon (the next version of MS SQL) will indeed let you do certain things in the database with
9. I asked a MS SQL Server DBA about real-time replication across multiple servers and his remark was "it doesn't work, don't use it."
Sounds like it's time to get a more informed consultant who can demonstrate failure or success beyond a throwaway line. I'm not saying replication does or doesn't work, but you can't base your enterprise plans on a single line from a single guy - let alone strangers like me on Slashdot. Furthermore, this isn't a
It's easy to make big decisions if you break them up into a series of smaller ones. Look at each of your questions and decide if it pertains to
What's your damage, Heather?
People in SMALL business do not want a system which requires them to hire someone to constantly keep tabs on it.
What?#$#@ I don't care who this "SMALL" business may be, but if you put a server on the internet, and plan on not having someone to "keep tabs on it", please, get off of the f-ing internet. It's that type of mentality that yields the servers out there that STILL are spreading Code Red and Nimbda, because nobody has kept tabs on these infected servers in years.
You're bound to get lots of responses of how to scale the system up. I'll focus on scaling the requirements down.
Unless the transactions are really long, "100+ concurrent requests" as a sustained rate is a lot of activity for a small business. So, that begs questions:
-- What percentage of these Web service requests are read-only "query" style, and can you use application-aware caching to return results out of RAM instead of having to hit disk for each one?
-- What is the client to this application, and can there be ways to help induce a smoother load from them (e.g., discount rates if the application is used in off hours or on weekends)? Or is the 100+ concurrent requests going on 24x7?
-- Do all the requests have to be filled by the server, or can you blend in some P2P concepts so the clients can absorb some of the load?
-- Can you increase the amount of data handled per transaction (perhaps by switching to document-style SOAP or REST instead of RPC-style SOAP) and thereby reduce the number of requests and excessive message parsing and marshalling?
There's probably a bunch other things to do as well, but those came to mind off the top of my head.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
If this guy is a consultant, sometimes clients have specifications for what type of hardware/software is used. Especially if their own IT group will be maintaining the systems.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
1, Buy *a lot* of memory for the box
.NET is the same but different - they both require a hefty amount of ram to operate at best performance (and atleast java just gets better the more memory that is available on the server ;)
.net remoting implementation instead - you can probably find a few with a quick google search (IIOP comes to mind, good way to make future interfacing with other technologies available just a easy as with webservices/soap and gaining better performance in the bargain).
2, Cache as much as you can of the dynamic content
3, try to stay away from bloated protocols
1: Java,
2: Maybe doesn't help much with scalability, performance will go up though - and maybe you might get good enough scalability too. Database access is always slower than a hashmap lookup (if said hashmap can stay in ram ofcourse)
3: Web-services etc etc are maybe good in theory but at the moment those technologies are a duck in a pond when it comes to scalability and performance. Use a highperformance
Also investigate how much you can make your site use asynchronous notifications, more is better - even if ms messaging client is too bad, you can write your own asynchronous "protocol".
Example configuration is a Windows 2000 box with dual Xeons and 2GB of RAM
I wrote and administer a J2EE application that supports online rebate offers for a very large company. We have over 350,000 registered users and typically 500 simultaneous sessions on a dual 1 GHz PIII Linux box with MS SQL Server on a similar dual CPU W2K box for the database.
Whatever you are doing with your application (probably misapplication of EJB) is wrong.
In other words, it's not what you're using to do it, it's how you're doing it. If you're just pumping out files to clients on modems, 100+ concurrent requests isn't much. If those requests are all CPU-bound, I hope they're all niced or set to a low priority, otherwise you won't be able to log into the machine in a reasonable amount of time. If it's 100+ concurrent connections, but those connections aren't necessarily waiting for a response (just idle until the user does something) then you might not even care.
How many whatevers you have must always be qualified by knowledge of what those whatevers are doing. Otherwise your whatevers won't fit in your $20k thingamajig. And then Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset.
Of course, whether .NET is a properly-implemented system is a separate debate...
Argh, I hate to give up moderation rights but I have to chime in here.
A small business CANNOT afford to employ a full time UNIX administrator. Open source solutions just do not have the ease of administration of the Windows GUIs. Until they do, they will not be small business friendly. Windows Small Business Server provides you with one installer that will basically set you up completely (Exchange Server and all).
Now, before you flame me out for being pro-Microsoft, you should know that almost all my machines at home run Gentoo Linux, and I prefer to use Linux myself.
I had a long discussion with a good friend who is not terribly computer literate. Linux drives him _crazy_ because he can't just, "point, click and go" as he said it. Until these issues are resolved, we won't see small organizations without dedicated IT staff rolling out Linux installs.
"I asked a MS SQL Server DBA about real-time replication across multiple servers and his remark was "it doesn't work, don't use it."
We are running transactional replication on several large databases (6-14 GB) on a Media Metrix top 50 website with no problems. It needs to be set correctly (batch size, timeouts, etc) but it does work quite nicely. The DB machine is heavy hardware, but it it able to keep up with 12-15 front end webservers, all with applications hitting the DB.
I find it funny to watch the war between the "why are you suggesting open source crowd" and the "open source is the only way". I have built IIS/ASP/SQL server solutions and I have built Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL solutions. There is a place and time for both solutions.
.NET so far due to the heavy memory footprint it places on a system. Yes, VB.NET is faster than VBScript, but if you were using compiled COM objects in the first place, .NET costs more memory for a slower system. (I do think that .NET's ability to do in place object updates rocks, but I hope you have a devolpment server for bouncing and PLAN your updates...)
As an aside, I have to say that I have avoided
But more to the point, your customers don't seem to have the budget to succeed in any domain. If you can't afford more than 20K for a machine and licenses, surely you can't afford to pay the programmers an adequate salary either. So does that mean open source? Heck no... you still have to pay the programmers! I don't think I have *ever* seen a project where the programmers were *cheaper* than the hardware.
Sig under construction since 1998.
I am the network admin at a large .Net website (5+ million unique visitors each month) and we often handle hundreds of tens of simultaneous requests. The entire site runs on 6 webservers and two database servers that run at less than 50% capacity during peak times.
If you can't scale above 100 connections on a 3GHz system then you are doing something wrong. Check your code, check your databases.
Your question is about as useful as "I have a piece of string that is not long enough, what can I use instead that is longer?"
And since he's talking about web services I would think he would be providing a web administration interface. If something breaks on the backend it's going to take a consultant to fix things whether it's Windows or UNIX.
I agree with the one poster that if this guy has low budget clients then he needs to be reducing costs in software so he can spec better hardware. If that software is open source then he needs to start learning open source stuff or find richer clients.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
A small business CANNOT afford to employ a full time UNIX administrator.
They can't affor NOT to: We service many small compaines who use Windows desktops connected to UNIX (OpenBSD firewalls, FreeBSD servers). The savings in time alone are staggering:
Real example:
One office of ten accountants has been managed by me lasst year for under $3000.
They have offsite backups, a PostgreSQL databe, Samba file serving, 56K nat, Firewall, email filtering.
If (and its a BIG if) one of the servers has a problem - I can remotly fix it over my cell phone connection, and I don't have to charge them travel time. If it was Windows - I'd have to drive there.
Windows is expensive because it requires full time baby-sitting. UNIX, once deployes is usuall fire and forget.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
A common misconception is that anybody can administer an MS server, but the truth is that it's not a whole lot easier to do than administer a Unix box. What's scary is that it looks easier and most IT managers think it's easier. That's why most Windows admins are grossly incompetent, especially when it comes to security.
A good Windows admin costs the same as a good Unix admin.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I had a long discussion with a good friend who is not terribly computer literate. Linux drives him _crazy_ because he can't just, "point, click and go" as he said it.
Windows systems need an administrator every bit as clueful as a UNIX sysadmin if they are to have any reliability at all. If the Windows 'sysadmin' has to be able to point-click-go to be able to function, in all probability the Windows system will be unreliable and insecure.
It is a false economy to think that "It's Windows. I can hire a junior reboot monkey to admin the system" - a Windows system really does require a sysadmin every bit as competent, skilled and clueful as a Unix system. A Windows system can be very reliable with a clueful admin - but it *needs* a clueful admin. Companies are shooting themselves in the foot if they think otherwise.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There are actually lots of reasons. Not to say that in all cases you *should* go with a big server instead of a bunch of little weeny-boxen... but the point is that "bigger server" doesn't equal "bad". Here's a few reasons:
For one, there's reliability:
-first of all, the more expensive systems have more internal redundancy, which is a good thing (sucks to hamstring even a cheap $1000 machine because the $5 cpu-fan dies, let alone a $3000 middle-of-the line machine because a $50 power-supply dies... or the $5 fan inside the $50 power-supply).
-if p(c) is the probability of a cheap machine crashing, and p(e) is the probability of a single expensive machine (your entire system) crashing, and you require all N of your cheap computers to be running in order to consitute an "up" system... then your overall system crash probability (p*) is:
p*(c) = 1-(1-p(c))^N
vs.
p*(e) = p(e)
so, by buying more, cheaper servers, you're increasing your crash-likelihood, by both increasing p(c) and increasing N (unless you buy additional cheap servers to failover to... but then you have to manage and support failover which is additional $$$ as well in terms of buying/developing/implementing more advanced systems and taking on a higher administration overhead).
Not all systems are distributable, and those that are are often more complicated and/or expensive (but not always).
There's also administration cost:
-Obviously its easier to manage one box than 10 (or easier to manage 5 boxes than a hundred). Not to say that there aren't nice tools for mass-administration... but it is still more work, and anyone who says different is selling something (and something you want to think twice about before buying).
There's ancillary costs:
-hey! if you have ten boxes talking to each other to comprise one "system", then you need a network connecting them! That's another fast switch... and again, because you don't want to lose an expensive "system" because of a failure of one cheap part, you need to buy an expensive switch.
-power costs money, believe it or not.
-so does rack-space.
-so do IPs... unless you're gonna NAT your little cluster, in which case you need to set up a NATing router for them... and that's another single point of failure unless you wanna shell out $$$ of one form another (again: buy/develop/implement).
-you're probably gonna need some sort of KVM switch.
I could go on, but I don't want to. Anyway, the point is that it is more complicated than many of the lot in this particular audience are likely to make out. It is often still the best route (and increasingly so!), but you can't just say that the answer is *always* to buy more, cheaper machines. There are many things to consider.
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
Actually, we supply a lot of small businesses in our area with whatever tech support they need. Kind of an outsourced IT staff. Paying us to fix things is as cheap as paying an MSCE monkey to spend 8 hours to fix a 5 minute job. We support OSS, so they save on licensing too. We even have a software team to make custom software, then release it open source.
.Net train before you can see where the tracks are going, then you go ahead. As for me, I plan to use as much cross-platform programming (mostly Java because the GUI is the same everywhere) and free/open source software that I possibly can, mostly because the products I use like JBoss (Free J2EE), Samba, MySQL/PostgreSQL/SAP/Firebird, etc. are more stable than .Net, Windows, MSSQL, etc.
The point is, they should be looking for the right service. You don't need dedicated staff with open source software. We get a call maybe once a month about an OSS product gone bad (usually something silly that can be fixed in 5 minutes if you know what you are doing), and we ssh in and fix it. We get calls about MS products and idiots that don't turn on things before they want to use them from 8AM till close every day. I'm pretty sure that most of our clients have spent more money on MS related tech support than OSS related tech support. I can calculate right now that the TCO for a pirated MS product would still be greater than a OS product by a significant factor. The speed at which MS products have to be fixed/patched is very much greater than a properly configured Linux system, and you're paying for that hell to boot.
If you want to shoot yourself in the foot by jumping on the
Before those of you that say the SQL Server is actually good start flaming me, that's where a lot of headaches come from. SQL Server drops records and corrupts more than MySQL before transaction support. (There, now I'll get flames from both ends.) Also consider the price you are paying. (Per connection last time I checked.) Spend more money on the hardware and get RAID-1 on good disks and a good UPS, and you will have a faster, more reliable RDBMS.
Karma Clown
telling those companies they don't just have to buy
TANSTAAFL.
No matter what you'll have to layout cash to buy the three essential ingredients:
Microsoft marketing would have you believe that their software solves all your problems and that lots of cheaply available people can do the job. They'll still charge you for their software and you'll find out that hardware still costs something and that getting good people to support and maintain your software and hardware is more expensive, but worth it.
Linux advocates will tell you that the software costs zero and that any competent sysadmin can do the job. You'll find out you still have to buy reasonable hardware. And you'll find out that getting good poeple to maintain and support your hw and sw costs more, but is worth it.
Any way you go you're gonna pay.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Sorry, I've got to go with the poster who says "If you don't have time to take care of your box, get the fuck off the Internet." I run a Linux/Apache site and my logs are full of requests for "default.ida?XXXXXXX..." and other viruses that came out (and were fixed) *years* ago. With UNIX, you pay a bit more in the beginning and then you hardly need to touch the box. Anything that needs to be done, a competent admin can do with nothing more than SSH. As opposed to MS boxes that just sit around, get owned, and fuck up everything. Sorry, but you can not have security and ease of use and low cost and easy to use all at once. Security is *not* fire-and-forget. Security is ongoing *work*. Work: not fun and not easy. You can't have your cake and eat it too. learn your way around, or pay an admin. Otherwise, someday you'll get owned and you'll become one more idiot contributing requests for 'default.ida' and 'root.exe' to my Apache logs.
And I'm sick of this attitude that always seems to come from SB owners, like they are *owed* something and *exempt* from working just because they're a small business. What would we do if they said "I don't have the time or money to learn the rules of the road or how to care for an automobile, I just want to blast down the road at 130 mph, trailing a could of oily smoke, because I'm a SMALL BUSINESS OWNER and I'm in a hurry, dammit!" Would we allow that kind of behavior? HELL NO. I'm sorry, it costs time and money. ACCEPT IT.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Furthermore, and I don't know much about .NET, he was also looking for an SQL
backend. You mention "Linux, apache, PHP, whatever" and "some servlet engine, jsp,
etc" without seeming to really understand a couple of crucial points: the "Java one"
would still need an OS and webserver, and all three still need a database server.
Really fancy, high-volume DB servers such as Oracle cost a lot. So then we end up
comparing, say, MySQL, MSSQL, mSQL, and PostgreSQL? Or Perl, PHP, ASP, and
JSP/servelets? I'm sure I'll get flamed by zealots, but those aren't always easy
comparisons.
Write it off as ignorance if you like. It doesn't sound like you're a professional in this field. But so what if he is ignorant? That was my point; if he is best with MS, it's not going to be profitable for him or his client for him to be mucking about with Unix instead.
As for the amount of money you'd save, well, I already commented on that. Sometimes the figures aren't necessarily what they may appear to be; the initial layout is certainly greater with commercialware, but support, time spent on maintainance and deployment, and so forth, is sometimes a lot less.
Install an SSH server on Windows and you'll have much of the same functionality as UNIX through the command line.
" With UNIX I'm in Ireland (I'm usually based in the US) and I get a call 'We just got a new user, could you add them'. I whip out my Ericcson 68i and Sharp Zaurus - and ssh into the server and run a script to add the user."
Did you even bother to check out whether this was possible in Windows? I guess not: this site shows you how to add a user from the command line in Windows. In fact, you could even write a script to do that (batch files... remember those?) In fact, here are lots of handy other things you can do from the command line in Windows, including changing user passwords, forcing users to log off, and more.
Once again, ignorance of what Windows can do is no excuse. I administer 16 Linux boxes... I'm not anti-Linux by any stretch of the imagination, and I know that there are lots of situations where Linux is the better choice. But that still doesn't mean I'm ignorant about what Windows can and can't do.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Holy mother of fscking god.
.NET and you *NEED* a remote facility between your layers, (And if you were working for me, you'd damn well prove it), then for the love of god, switch to Remoting. Don't know what that is? Grab a book, dumbass. You can use a binary formatter and jump your speed by an order of magnitude, or you can fall back to a SOAP formatter on remoting and still double your performance.
.NET is your own stupidity. No matter if you are on .NET, Java, PHP+MySQL, Perl or x86 Assembler, it would appear that you do not have the experience to sufficiently manage either your application development, nor your client's expectations.
STOP USING WEB SERVICES.
#1) If you are using the [WebMethod] shit and hosting your SOAP calls via IIS you need a smack in the head.
#2) If you are using SOAP to communicate between the layers of your application, and are not exposing the SOAP methods for external consumers of the web services, You need more smacks in the head.
#3) If you don't know what you are doing, hire someone who does. (and by the sound of your point #6 about using reflectiona and dynamic code in the production app, you don't.)
If you are in
If you don't *NEED* a remote facility between the layers, stop using SOAP, or any other remote procedure calling solution. Nothing pisses me off more than bandwagon jumping know-nothings using a fancy fucking hammer to solve a problem which requires far less.
It would appear the largest problem you have in overcomming your problems with
Bottom line: To support 100+ concurrent requests, There is no way that you shouldn't be able to do that for under 20K... (although I wonder where that number came from.. Do these servers sit in a vacuum? Who's running them?)
From a purely acedemic standpoint, what the heck were you guys thinking when you were going to spend only 20K on the hardware for an app that does 100+ concurrent transactions. That sounds like enough business to afford quite a heck of a lot more.
If you are/were so budget constrained, why are you spending at thousands on server software? (.NET server, SQL Server, etc...) If you are so budget constrained, you shoulda bought opensource.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
I've designed infrastructure and application-level systems that use .NET and happily meet your requirements (MSMQ is not scalable? Huh?), and then some. So yes, to answer all your question, it works. But if you don't know what you're doing it's very simple to fuck it up, regardless of whether you're using Microsoft products or not.
Coming here (!) and asking questions about whether or not a given Microsoft product is viable seems to me like a losing proposition. FWIW, most professionals that work with Microsoft technologies are far more willing to admit shortcomings in those products and suggest alternatives, something that the /. crowd seems incapable of. So at least if you hire someone in the know you won't get BS left and right.
So get some help.
This guy is trolling. From his post:
... ...
...
I've found Red Hat 9 most impressive.
The included version of Wine
From the Red Hat 9 Release Notes:
The following packages have been removed from Red Hat Linux 9:
- wine - Developer resource constraints
But you aren't exactly right either.
You are simplifying when you say to not 'embed applications' in the DB. I will interpret 'embedding applications' in the DB as doing business logic in the database.
Many times it is more resource efficient for the _database server_ to perform some of the business logic in the _database server_.
It can be more efficient for the database to do some operations which results in a relatively small result set rather than pushing a lot of data up to the application server.
The bottleneck will usually not be the CPU on the database server, it will be the disks. And the disks are better utilized when you do the manipulation inside the DB server itself.
This breaks the separation of the business logic tier, data access layer-paradigm. Design that is easy to maintain and design that is efficient to execute don't always go hand in hand.
I'm a pragmatist. I say, make an n-tier application. Make an object oriented design. But don't be rigid, break the rules if it suits your purposes. Hey, I even use a goto every once in a while when it makes my code faster or simpler.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!