Best Hardware Configuration for ASP.NET Hosting Application

Question

We have developed a vacation rental application in ASP.NET with SQL server as DB. Used .NET 3.5 with Entity Framework. Currently QA test this with P4 machine with 2GB RAM. Looks like the processor utilization goes up to 50% for every request. All our DB retrieval timings are < 1 sec. The page load is very slow. We applied all performance tips at IIS level (Compression, Keep Connection Live) and caching to limit the bandwidth (which is normal at 300-500 KB).

We use Telerik RAD Controls for most of the pages. It has been decided that the server hardware is the bottleneck (from HTTP Analyzer measuring the Wait time).

We expect 100 concurrent users 100-200 transactions per second. We run both the IIS & SQL server in the same server at well & hosted in GoDaddy.

The legacy application responds very well at the same server - No EF, Telerik Controls etc.

Can anyone recommend good hardware configuration RAM, CPU Speed etc & what other techniques to speed up the performance?

Answer 1

These days servers are pretty well configured for a good price. You could get a

Xeon Quad, 4 Gig 250+ HDD Windows Server 2003

Machine for around $200 a month if you look around for offers.

I think this machine is pretty well-configured for your purpose. Did you disable the debug mode while testing?

Were you testing on IIS or in Visual Studio? Testing in Visual Studio does not give you a good representation of the final resource consumption.