How does IIS compare in terms of performance and scalability to weblogic and websphere for enterprise web applications?

Question

A common argument against using .NET for high volume, transactional enterprise systems is that IIS does not compare to the likes of Weblogic and websphere for java. Is this true? Unfortunately for .NET web apps IIS is the only option as an application server. Does anyone have any arguments against this? I would like to promote .NET more in the enterprise and need some help putting my case forward.

Thanks

Answer 1

This site runs on .NET with LinqToSql. See this post for details.

Answer 2

A number of very popular sites use .Net: Myspace.com, Dell.com, Match.com, Monster.com, Newegg.com ...

See more here: http://www.asp.net/get-started/

Also, you can run .Net on Apache using mod_mono.

Answer 3

I've been coding ASP.NET for 6 years now and prior to getting into the field I was a network engineer. IMO, ASP.NET on IIS is faster out of the box than most of those other platforms. However, it's easy to screw up performance with mediocre programming skills, and it is possible that a highly tuned platform could beat a standard IIS configuration.

Honestly, I don't put much stock in the whole debate about which platform has the higher potential performance, because I've never had to address the issue, and I've developed sites which received upwards of 2-3 million hits an hour without hiccups.

Answer 4

Actually, running ASP.NET on Mono/Apache is starting to become popular.

Personally I stick to IIS because that's what I know, but if you are already a Linux shop I would recommend Mono without hesitation.

Answer 5

If you are asking if IIS & .Net can do high performance web sites, the answer is yes. You are unlikely to get to the kind of scale where either of the web servers you have mentioned starts being the problem. You are more likely to have issues with back end databases first.

If you are asking how to convince management then I would try some MS case studies which can all be found at the Microsoft Case Study site.

You will probably want to find a case study that is relevant to your field of business, but here are some that I have used in the past:

1. GoDaddy.com: World’s Largest Domain Registrar Moves 3.5 Million Domains from Linux to Windows
2. London Stock Exchange Cuts Information Dissemination Time from 30 to 2 Milliseconds
3. Virgin Group: Web Site Traffic Increases by Almost 50 Per Cent with Microsoft .NET
4. Break.com: Popular Entertainment Site Handles Up to 35 Million Daily Page Views on Two Web Servers

Answer 6

Even though this is not strictly true I view IIS as more of a web server than a high performance application server, the use cases for each server are typically slightly different.

WebSphere for example is extremely popular within the financial community where there is a lot of mission critical distributed transactional processing. This can be achieved by IIS but its a lot easier with the likes of WAS or weblogic.

To me; application server available is one of the major reasons .net is not keeping up with Java on the server side.

Karl

Answer 7

IIS 7 is actually quite fast for static pages (thanks to a cache in the kernel).

But it is quite slow as an application server: g-wAN is four times faster.