ASP.NET Scaling Strategies
So there is a very good article that came out in the April 2008 issue of the MSDN Magazine, Scaling Strategies for ASP.NET Applications. The main things in this article are:
- Scaling ASP.NET Applications and databases
- Optimizing code
- Using efficient caching
- Affinity and load balancing
One of the most useful things I found about the site is the analyze tool. This site will look at your web site and give you detailed analysis of your page. Telling you things you can do to make your site have better performance. The types of things it talks about are:
- Total_html – number of web pages
- Total_objects – number of objects on the page
- Total_images
- Total_css
- Total_size
- Total_script
- Html_size
- Images_size
- Script_size
- Css_size
- Multim_size – size of multimedia files on site
They give a lot of useful tips to make your site perform better and have less data to download.
After this, there are a bunch of useful topics, but the most important thing mentioned is to use AJAX where possible. Not only does this make the web page look more like a desktop application, but since it is only going to update the specific content that needs to be changed. All the rest of the data will still be downloaded to the client. This greatly reduces the load to the server.
One thing that they talk about is the Performance Equation for the web
This is a useful for figuring out how your web site is going to perform. And you can use it to figure out how best to improve performance.
Feel free to read through that article and you can see more information about caching and database improvements as well. If anyone has other tools or methods that they use to help with scaling, I’d like to hear about them.