Server/Software Scalability Question 1

[IndyGill]

Hi

I have a bit of an unusual question but seeing I am a asp.net developer I thought this would be the best forum for it.

OK I am currently writing a proposal for an organisation and they have asked how scalable and what is the capacity of my servers/software. But im not to sure how to answer this?

I currently have two IBM xSeries 232 rack mounted servers (1.26Ghz, 1Gb SDRAM, 3 x 18.2Gb SCSI) running Window 2000 Server. One server is my Web Server and the other is my SQL 2000 server

Currently my web server only runs about 3 small websites (each 10mg in size) im just wondering how many sites will ISS 5 allow me to host before incurring problems?

Also I suppose a very similar question arises when it comes to the Microsoft SQL 2000 server. How many databases can I hold without it incurring problems.

On both servers hard disk space is not a factor as this can be easily upgraded. Im apologies for it being such an unusual question but a ball park figure or maybe a rule of thumb would be much appreciated.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[AGIMA]

In general terms most projects have one web site for one web server, and they have one database for one database server.

Here is a general rule of thumb:

Resources on a web server is not taken up by the amount of web site you have on the server but the amount of hits/traffic. You could have a few hundred web site on one web server with out any problems, but if all these web sites were dynamic and getting a lot of traffic then it would suffer.

This is the same for SQL Server. I have worked on a very large SQL server that had over 100 million rows in one table, with out any problems, but it was running only the one database. I have also worked on SQL servers that have over 40 seperate Databases and there was no performance hit.

What we do is monitor the servers (ie their CPU, memory, page time outs and other measures) and when they start to get overloaded we fix it by either adding new hardware or modifing the offending code (web site).

The servers that you have stated dont sound real big, but neither do the web sites. I would think that you could quite easly run around 100 web sites with around 50 databases off these servers (of course if they were not heavy on CPU usage/traffic).

Hope that helps and good luck.

Let me know how you go.

AGIMA - professional web hosting is our business.

AGIMA Computing

http://www.agima.com.au