Server Capacity Guidelines

[BillLumbergh]

Is there some accepted benchmark that says if you are running a web server on a machine with x processors of y speed with z memory, it should be able to comfortably handle n users? We have a period of time each year where, due to deadlines and procrastinators, our site gets totally bombarded for about a week. And for that week, the performance is pretty miserable. The rest of the year though we are fine. We are smack in the middle of said week, and the modifications that we made since last year don't seem to be helping all that much. I guess I'm just trying to figure out, is our server underpowered for this number of users, or is our code just inefficient or poorly written? Is there some gauge to say based on our server specs how many users we should be able to handle, or is it dependent on complexity of the application, etc? All signs point to the web server (contains ASP and VB COM), as the DB server is performing under minimal strain, and there is no network strain to speak of. We are trying to determine if our code is inefficient or our server doesn't have the capacity to handle this number of users.

Thanks for any input.

 

[octothorpe]

This is very application specific. If you are serving up static pages, each server will be able to handle more than if you were serving up dynamic content. If you are unable to satisfy the load, then one of three things is true:

1) You need more bandwidth.
2) You need more horsepower.
3) Your application isn't well tuned for performance.

If you don't have the option of changing #3, then you have to revert to #2. Using a little performance monitoring of the server you should be able to quickly determine where the bottleneck is between those two.

 

[itsp1965]

Bill, you may want to try the Compaq (sorry HP)activeanswers site, which has some pretty good tools for sizing application servers and documentation on sizing.