IIS

[Michael]

I am working for a startup .com company and we will be hosting our own web
sites. I know that there is a limit of 128 sites per server with IIS.

Some sites might only get 10000 hits per month but some might get more than
1,000,000 per month. What type of machines do I need for this?

All sites will tie into a SQL database that will be stored on another
machine.

I am thinking that a dual P3 500 with 256MB ram would be sufficicent for
most of the servers, but for the higher hitting sites, we might need to
limit them to maybe 50 sites per machine. Have them with 512 MB Ram.

All computers would be SCSI LVD drives - Seagate Cheetah, etc.

What do you think?

Michael

[John Leggett]

Depends on the type of site you construct and how consistent your traffic
is. There is no limit of 128 sites per server in IIS5. There have been
implementations of up to 2500 sites per server in production already. Any
web server running W2K and IIS5 should be running 512 megs minimum and a gig
or more for heavy use boxes. Also IIS5 will scale pretty well to 4
processors now, unlike IIS4. You might want to go with Advanced server and
use NLB to provide scalability and redundancy as well.

"Michael" <nshb...@gte.net> wrote in message
news:u224qAqM$GA.250@cppssbbsa04...

[Tom A]

I disagree.... I am the Director of Internet Properties for a major internet
company. Our websites are consistently in the top 100 visited sites on the
Internet as ranked by MediaMetrix and PCData Online. There is no limit on
the number of sites you can set up on a server. HOWEVER... your server will
work best if you do the following....

1) Uncheck "Enable Sesssion State" in the Home Directory tab -->
Configuration --> App Options page for all sites not needing to manage user
sessions. Always use cookies when you can. If you find that you need
sessions enabled, set it to a lower value (10 minutes is good).

2) Under App Mappings tab in the same area, make sure Cache ISAPI
applications is checked and then delete mappings for all extensions that you
will not be using.

3) All interfacing with the databases should be done in ActiveX Components
called from ASP pages. Please refer to 15seconds.com for required reading.

4) You will find that as websites get busier and busier they will suddenly
start spawning HTTP Error 500 "Internal Server Error" pages. You can fix
this by going to Home Directory --> Application Settings on the "culprit"
high traffic website. Change the name to the name of the website.... and
check Run In Separate Memory Space. This will separate the higher traffic
sites from the rest of them on IIS. That way the whole server will not
crash because of one busy site.

5) Go to the Control Panel on the server and then System. Change the
Performance tab so that resources are most dedicated to background
applications.

6) If you are going to use NT Server 4, make sure that you enable the
registry to use all of the 1024Kb of cache on your chips rather than the
256K it is designed to default to. Other tweaks like this one can be found
at regedit.com.

The biggest server I have here is running with 2-PIII450s and 384 Mb RAM and
running a mixture of 50 busy and unbusy sites. And there really isn't a
dent in it. I say that you start with at least two P 400s and use the
configuration you have to get you started. I do not recommend putting more
than 50 sites on any machine, but it is mostly preference talking.

Finally, if you are desperate for power, you can up the motherboard to 112
Mhz and this will push your processors faster.

I am not out to hurt anyone's feelings, but don't ever let anyone tell you
to put more that 512mb in an NT server. And if you manage to get that much
traffic to one machine, then you and I need to talk because you are a
marketing genius... LOL

You can always tell when you need more RAM when your harddrive is constantly
being hit. The more Ram you put in the less work you will see the harddrive
do. Monitor your system resources on the Windows Taskbar to see what steps
you need to take. You want to keep processors below 70% average to keep
your websites running briskly.

Hope this helps!

Tom

[Venus]

thanks for the ips you showed here, I used them on my site, I have one site on a
dual P II 400 with cheetah hard drives and 512 megs of RAM, I also use the intel
n44bx server board. what do you consider hi traffic sites, mine alone gets an
average of 20,000 unique hits a day.

Tom A wrote:

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