enterprise level web server concurrency/loadbalancing ? 1

[bobo12]

hi,
so we are planning to set up a biz website with enterprise level software(server)/hardware solutions. my ? is the following...
i am designated as the developer/programmer for this proj but i have never really written asp code/server code to service over 150 clients, i was wondering, how is writing enterprise level solutions different from regular apps.

are there any resources, websites or other docs that i can look at to guide me through the details of programming an enterprise level solution.

in addition, think of my ? as the following...
if u have written a simple web server to service say < 50 clients, how would you modify/design a web server to service 1500000 clients. we will be using iis6.0 so i don't know how/what to change inorder to make it operate at such high levels of traffic.

hardware is not an issue b/c we can simply buy more hardware. don't have engough $ to hire an enterprise level developer, don't need one either since i am confident i can do it given a sample/doc/or guidelines for enterprise level programming.

by the way, if u know of any other resources other than for microsoft products, please mention it.

 

[myCMDB]

Hi,
we (myCMDB.com) are an application service provider and provide Network Inventory and Configuration Management to independent consultants and mid size businesses. Our Application is J2EE based.

We use a cisco load balancer called local director which is basically a linux machine. Cisco replaced their local director with a new product called content switch (CSS) which is very powerful. We are currently testing the CSS but either way we've had a better experience with the hardware load balancers (which can be configured as VLan bridges) rather than the Web Server bundled load balance features.

In our case we monitor our server utilization very tightly and we add a new J2EE server if we reach 200 concurrent sessions on each server across all servers. Currently we run three servers and average at about 500 concurrent users.
If you are serving an internal customer base you may have negotiated maintenance windows, with external customers it is trickier. Load balancers usually check the web server tcp listeners and fail users over in case of a crashed server, however session management can be tricky if that happens. If you need to bring a server down for maintenance you can also avoid new traffic distribution to the server and you will have to wait until the existing sessions are closed or expired, then you can perform the maintenance work without user impact.

As far as resources go, SUN/Java is a good starting point for J2EE applications but it often results in "learn as you go". Many people had a bad experience with a certain setup, sometimes because they used it wrong, sometimes because it did not work quite right but in enterprise software development there is often no right or wrong, there are things which work better or worse. In our case we're trying to get away from sessions because we found that failover often causes problem with sessions, but then there are many J2EE servers which are supposed to address this problem.

Hope that helps,

Jim Davis
myCMDB.com

Network Inventory & Configuration Management