Can .NET Really Scale? 653
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."
Why one server? (Score:1, Interesting)
Christ, those machine figures! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm deploying systems right now (some buzzword compliant, some (more efficient ones) on lowly little open source, that scale to an order of magnitude higher transaction volume at a fraction of the cost. No, none of them are windows.
No wonder my company has been doing well in a downturn. (Oh, sorry, we're "recovering" now.)
What the web app doing? (Score:2, Interesting)
What is the web app going to do? All the hardware in the world, and even open source won't help you much if you're trying to do the wrong things on a single machine. Database driven site? Commerce? HEavy read, heavy write, or both?
Re:Hmm so Linux is cheap (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems to me swordfish is going to be coding it anyway. I'm sure he can figure out how costly it is to retrain him to program Unix/Java.
Having said that, colleges/universities are churning out Java programmers at an alarming rate. And seeing how unemployment is only rising (lots of experienced people on the market) newcomers are really, really cheap! (They're used to living like.. well.. like students!)
Also, is programming for this new-fangled
Now, I agree that finding reasonably adept administrators for windows is much easier, and cheaper, than finding ace Unix admins. But that doesn't say anything about coders.
If swordfish is doing a feasibility study on this, for Pete's sake, suggest an alternative with less Microsoft in it! Any reason why that server should be
.NET is very young (Score:1, Interesting)
Java and JSP had this problem early on and still are not overly fast performers.
I would recommend that you spend $10k on a database server. Then get 5 $2k machines, run two as web servers and 3 as aplication servers running your
Besides that nothing more then tweaking the code and OS is going to get you to 200 connections.
Re:Java is a DOG (Score:4, Interesting)
Faster is not the only concern for many businesses (Score:3, Interesting)
Middleware said it could. (Score:2, Interesting)
hth,
Bill
Re:Why are they running Windows then? (Score:3, Interesting)
But reading comments like this, is it any wonder that businesses, "small" and large have stopped spending so much money on IT recently ?
As far as businesses are concerned, computers are just tools to do jobs, to help those companies generate money. If they don't help make them money, there's no reason for them to spend money on IT.
And here we are telling those companies they don't just have to buy the equipment, and the software, they have to continuously spend time and money on people to protect them, look after them, and update them.
No wonder companies are beginning to ask "what's the benefit ?", "why should I spend this money ?".
And no wonder IT people are beginning to ask "where are all the jobs ?".
Re:Are you asking about .NET, or something else? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oracle 9i and maybe 8 allows you to use Java for stored procedures.
It has some performance improvements over PL/SQL but I never really thought that it was useful. More like "another shiny button" added to a product.
What?! (Score:3, Interesting)
What?! You've never heard of any of the following:
-- Terminal Services
-- VNC for Windows
-- Remote Desktop commercial programs
I am sorry, but that is just on crack (and so is whoever modded you "Insightful".) In fact, with Terminal Services and the rdesktop client program, you can even administer a Windows desktop or server from a Linux or Mac box. Yes, you can do remote reboots, remote software patches, remote software upgrades, and pretty much everything else.
There are lots of valid reasons for using Linux/BSD/UNIX, but being ignorant about Windows certainly doesn't help your case.
Re:What?! (Score:5, Interesting)
What?! You've never heard of any of the following: -- Terminal Services -- VNC for Windows -- Remote Desktop commercial programs
Yes I use them all the time, but when I'm on the road I have to manage servers over my CELL PHONE coneection. Window Termmial Services is unsuable in that situation.
Here's an example:
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.
With Windows: I have to find a "Internet Cafe" pay 10 Euros, and convince the owner of the cafe to let me install VNC. Then I get to S-L-O-W-L-Y use the gui to add the user.
It get's even better - I can remotly manage my servers in the absolute wilderness with an Iridium satelite phone and a Zaurus with a serial cable. At 9600 baud, I can do it with UNIX - but Windows, forget about it.
Benchmarking for dummy's (Score:1, Interesting)
Want to know how to build a scalable system in
As far as my personal experience, the tools available in
I've done the LAMP thing too, so I'm not just a Microsoft sucker. I use the best tool for the job..
-Woo
It depends (Score:3, Interesting)
Long answer: It completely depends on what you are doing. As one person pointed out, if you are performing very complex queries, then scalability would go down. There's plenty of room for bottlenecks.
One of our ASP.NET applications benchmarks at about 90 concurrent requests on a dual proc 1Ghz xeon. That's with several database reads per request.
Your question is if ".NET scales", but really you could break your problem into at least three questions:
1) Does
Yes. It scales extremely well, provided you follow best practices and design a scalable app.
2) Does SQL Server scale well?
Well, but probably not the best. Again, depends greatly on the design.
3) Does IIS scale well?
Well, but definitely not the best. IIS is designed for extensibility and scalability. Obviously they made trade offs in each area. Other servers are be more scalable, but less extensible.
Given that, I would recommend doing some very simple benchmarks: Write a webservice that returns a hard-coded string. Test that. Next write a service that connects to a database and returns or adds a single record. You get the idea. You can use MS Application Stress Test for this.
Another option is to use programs like RedGate ANTs and Query Analyzer to track down any bottlenecks in your code and SQL.
You may also consider options like remoting or even writing your own multithreaded server if you think you can squeeze better performance by implementing a thinner transport...
Finally, while you may not want to change the web server or development platform, you do have fairly wide range of choices as far as databases go. You could use MySQL backend, or any database you thought was better\cheaper than SQL server.
In the end, I think this question is too complex to simply blame on ".NET".
Good luck.
Re:You've got bigger issues. (Score:1, Interesting)
Here would be my answers, though this chap is so clueless it's barely worth it.
1. Says you. On the one hand this question is about bargain basement equipment and setup, but it needs to be a high load messaging server? Uh huh.
2. This question should be "Should I use SOAP?".
3. "I have a hammer so why can't every problem be a nail? I don't understand RDBMS'...I'm confused!"
4. What sort of claptrap BS is this? The SQL Server numbers are not only best for the highest TPC, but also for most TPCs for the cheapest amount. Pure BS question.
5. Uh...
6. Uh...okay...don't use flipping reflection then. Absolutely ridiculous.
7. Firstly this is pure, unadulterated BULLSHIT (ASPX absolutely SMOKES ASP in virtually all situations), but even ignoring that, what does this have to do with
8. Completely ignorant.
9. I will somewhat give this. Replication on SQL Server, like on most database servers, is a bitch, however it works great when done correctly. However I suspect that someone is just digging in a bag of concepts because for what they're talking about it would be wholly inappropriate.
How this pure bullshit got posted on the front page boggles the mind. Actually, no, I just realized that this is Slashdot...it doesn't boggle the mind at all. In fact it makes total sense.
Next up : "Does Windows 2000 Scale?"
"I used Windows 2000 on a Pentium 60 with 128MB of RAM, and when I call WaitForSingleEventEx sometimes it takes more than 60ms!"
$ and Cents (Score:1, Interesting)
Hardware is almost always cheaper than developer time. I suggest you sit down with your $20,000 customer and explain that spending budget on hardware may be far more economical than spending it on developer time.
Do you buy one rackmount system at $1500 or 75 developer hours at a conservative $20/hr rate? For a team of 8 developers, $1500 is only one day of development time.
Developer time is far more expensive than hardware.
Wrong technology possibly (Score:1, Interesting)
We have a client that serves 140-160 concurrent connections at once for about 16 hours a day. Our environment:
1 Dual Xeon 2Ghz system 2G Ram
1 Dual Xeon 2Ghz running MSSQL 2000
Coldfusion MX which is java based. The application is heavily consuming web services.
No problem whatsoever. The boxes are both running MS Server 2k. These boxes are not even the latest technology.
I know you hardcore asp/.net developers get mighty testy and will say this is simply not possible, well it is. I know it's hard to stomach something as simple to learn as Coldfusion scaling better than your convoluted solution.
And coldfusion is java based so the application server runs on windows/solaris/linux. portable. much quicker to design and build out applications.
Match.com Developer's Blog (Score:3, Interesting)
- Jalil Vaidya
Re:Ignorance is no excuse. (Score:1, Interesting)
1) Insall a SSH
There's the first sign you're talking from a point of ignorance of Windows. You are directly biased by your knowledge of Unix. You want to do everything the unix way, and if it isn't supported then its obviously no good.
Windows doesn't need SSH, it quite happily will encrypt your comms out of the box - you might not even notice you're using it with a dial-up connection as the server can be told to mandate certain secure VPN connections. Tick the box on the server, use normal shell apps - not some specific app.
Every windows admin knows a little scripting, and a lot (especially the serious ones) know all about windows scripting host. That allows you to do practically everything (if you have permissions before someone starts on about security holes).
I shall look up how to dump a SQLServer database directly. But I know how you can do it with the DTS, when you create a package with the pointy-clicky GUI, you can save it as a VBScript file, which you can run using WSH. All the ease of point+click, all the flexibility of command lines.
Go learn how to admin Windows servers and you won't be posting any more of these "windows is crap 'cos it ain't like unix" messages. You may then get a job maintaining Windows servers too, or is that beneath your dignity
As a former Microsoft Software Engineer... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:.NET Benchmarks (Score:2, Interesting)
Two different questions. (Score:3, Interesting)
I am by no means a fan of Microsoft. To be honest I hope that your projects dies, and this can be added to the long list of people that I know who bet the farm on Microsoft just to either have far more NT servers than employees, or they go out of business... but I will give my 2 cents.
You seem to have defined some of the basic bottlenecks of performance. What you appear to leave out is what happens at certain loads. Does the system die? Probably not, but what happens to the response time? What are the acceptable requirements for the system? You may find 25 seconds for a page to load unacceptable, but the users may not. Either way it will let you know what goal you need to hit. Can you configure your DB to use less or more RAM?
Next, is it for sure processor load that is the issue? My guess is that you would be far better off with an x86 chip with more cache and stronger memory bandwidth than a standard P4. Granted this involves another hardware purchase, but if that becomes an option at all look at an Operton or Xeon chip in a 2 way system. You can get one of those systems well under 4 grand. The Opteron flat out rocks and the new Xeon 3GHZ with 1MB cache should be hitting the streets soon.
Not knowing much about the dark sides languages (Java is my thing), are you using one database connection throughout your application? Not returning it back to a connection pool, but storing it in the session object? This can have a significant impact on performance.
Seeing that you said you talked to a SQL Server expert (I have never met one), I will assume that he looked through the code and optimized all the SQL. Everyone seems to be taking cheap shots an d saying you should have used product X, well here is my cheap shot... Next time use Oracle! I repeat next time use Oracle! Ok, it bears repeating one more time.... next time use Oracle. Granted it is expensive, but you are learning a lesson that a ton of shops here in Indy have had to learn the hard way. Well what the heck next time use Java + JBOSS or Resin + Oracle + Linux. In our environment it flat out rocks.
What else is running on the box? You can buy a sub $500 machine to move all the DNS AD stuff to it. Not sure how much that impacts performance though... it may not be worth it. But my point is to turn off every unused service. Also, I will assume that you have applied every service pack, and called Microsoft. Since you are using ALL their products, you would think that they would help you. God I would love to be in on that call!!! All I ever hear them say is "You need to get off of product x" and use our product.
Generally what I find to be the issue with performance is SQL and DB access. The code takes around nothing to execute processor wise. Now what kind of DB are you talking about? How many tables and how many rows in each table. What kind of transactions do you do (mostly inserts or querys). Are the indexes setup correctly on the tables? Could you flatten some relationships down?
Sounds like a troll (Score:3, Interesting)
The kind of loads big firms need to support are in the order tens of millions of users with millions of transactions a day. What I mean by transactions is buy process which can contain a dozen to a couple hundred individual orders. In other words, the number of complex insert/updates is tens of millions to hundreds of millions a day.
For example, big firms like fedility, city group, thompson, vanguard, and schwab have millions of customers with hundred thousand plus portfolio managers. throughout a given work day, a portfolio manager may generate a couple hundred orders and submit them in one or two batches. This is done because it's cheaper for them. Can .NET scale well? Like what others say, it can if you design it right. For example, if you use MSMQ for it's designed job it works well. If you write your queues for MSMQ with plain hashtables and you don't index the messages, your chances of supporting 10K+ messages a second aren't likely. On the otherhand, if you write custom queue's, profile the messages, index them efficiently and make sure no other heavy weight stuff sits on the same box it can scale. Is that easy? No. You have to understand the problem you're trying to solve. Let's say hypothetically you have insane performance requirements like 100K+ messages a second for a messaging tier, you're better off using IBM MQSeries. Can you do the same thing with MSMQ? Sure if you build a bunch of custom stuff, write the messages to a database, index, partition and load balance. It will probably take you 8-12 months to do it, but you can with the right people and good hardware. Would you want to use XML for that messaging system? The answer is obviously no, if you want to keep the cpu and memory loads manageable.
Many people have claimed they support thousands of transactions. Sure if all you're doing is insert into one table. Simple stuff right. Financial transactions like trading systems do a heck of alot more than a simple insert into one table. More often than not, a trade transaction with 100 orders goes into the database, affecting several tables. The middle tier then has to get events, and check the order to make sure it is valid and does not violate regulations or other compliance requirements. Sometimes it requires analytics like Tibco or what the industry calls Business Intelligence. Regardless of the server, stuff like analytics take time (seconds). Obviously if you're running complex analytics that scane 10 million rows of data with several joins in the query, you're better off using an analytics server like OLAP. Can .NET handle 1K analytics requests per second? If it's cached sure. If the nature of the data is very dynamic, like realtime trading systems, no way. doing that is very hard and most people avoid it.
The key here is setting the expectations accurately, so your customer knows what is realistic. If you have a hard time communicating that to your customer or management, than find another job.
A short guide to scalability (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, if you define a target performance metric and find that a single user can access the system at better or equal that speed, then a system can be said to "scale" if it still performs within that metric, on average, when 20, or 50, or 100, or whatever users are accessing the system.
Of course, due to the nature of computing systems, any system will hit a point where it will no longer scale to the requirements with the same hardware configuration. At that point we start talking about scaling upwards through hardware upgrades. But you can only upgrade hardware so far, at which point, again, the system will reach a hard limit on its ability to perform as required.
The next logical step is to scale through redundancy: If a system can, in whole or (more commonly, as in "multi-tier" web clusters) in part, run concurrently in multiple instances, then you can scale by adding more instances of the system or system components: Multiple web servers, multiple "back ends", multiple database servers, and similar. This kind of organic scaling can be, in practical terms, near-infinite if a system is designed well; for example, multiple mirrored web servers serving static pages will scale indefinitely, whereas a trading system requiring inter-process synchronization through a message-queue system will most likely not.
In scalability terms, efficient redundant clusters is the holy grail. It's the way Google scales, and it's how the core parts of the Internet scales.
In the context of this Slashdot story, since the poster faces limited possibilities for investing in expensive hardware, he might consider going for the "many cheap boxes" route, if his Microsoft-dominated infrastructure permits it.
IBM DB2 allows C / Java / COBOL / Fortran... (Score:2, Interesting)
It was also pretty handy in the old days if you wanted to automatically trigger an email when your dinky little online sales site recorded a whopping $500 order for Idaho potatoes, and you had to warm up the jalopy so you could make the drive to Idaho.
On a related note... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why are they running Windows then? (Score:2, Interesting)
A quick lesson in optimization from the local DBA taught me how to tune it to use 80% of the physical RAM, keep log files on separate physical drives (and buss if possible) than the data file. If you can isolate log/data/os, so much the better. So I did that and performance immediately improved 3000% or more. I'm sure there are several other tune-ups I've forgotten and hundreds I never learned.
Even so, IIS throughput for static and ASP apps (pre-.NET) was difficult to get above 200 and 100 concurrent connections respectively several years ago. Performance tuning is all about test, analysis, tinker... unless this guy knows where his bottlenecks are, there's not much anyone can suggest to help.
And if he knows where the bottlenecks are, then he wouldn't be asking this question.
The sad thing is that without analyzing the bottlenecks, people go buy faster CPUs where RAM was needed, or multi-proc systems with 15K RPM drives when moving to GigE would have done three times as much.
Then there is the application itself. What is it trying to do? What can be cached? What is unnecessary? Can lookups be bundled together? I've seen Verity servers dragged down to 1TPS through crazy business requirements and poor development understanding. There is no such thing as a inherently fast platform. And no replacement for careful, analysis-based perforformance testing.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's your major malfunction? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is what my company has done since 1996, and their are times we get push back. However, 90% of the time, we end up saving the company significant money. On hardware, software, maintenance, support and development.