Web server statics repository -or- ZFS vs. NTFS

Question

Hello everyone. My goal is to maintain web file server separately from main ASP.NET application server for better scalability. Web file server will store a lot of files downloaded by users. So the question is: Is it worth to adopt FreeBSD + Apache + ZFS, or good old IIS will be сonvinient enough?

Answer 1

I understand you will serve only static files. In this case, lightweight HTTP servers will give you a higher performance for a given machine. The following are well known:

• Lighttpd
• Thttpd
• Nginx

Many more are listed on Wikipedia. There's a more recent article on IBM DeveloperWorks.

Answer 2

It all depends on your skill level and how much load you are getting on your servers.

If you have spare (physical) resources and have the technical skills and experience to maintain production machines running different operating systems, I'd recommend going running lighttpd on either Linux or FreeBSD. A light OS install with a static file optimized server will perform faster than Apache or IIS on a heavy OS.

However, unless you are extremely comfortable with these solutions, just stick to IIS on Windows. Move the static files to their own machine if you have sufficient load. If you aren't currently thinking about multiple ASP.Net frontends, there's probably no need to spin off the static files yet unless we're talking multiple gigabytes of files.

Answer 3

If you're serving files over the Internet, you might also consider Amazon's S3 service. I've found the rates and reliability to be better than anything I could do (or find) on my own.