Hi all,
This is really a 2 part question. First of all, I just wanted to know how common is asp.net in the real world?
Secondly, I just want to know what are the read world scenario regarding scaling a asp.net site? http://highscalability.com/ almost never talked about the asp.net stack. Does anyone have any reason article that talks about how to scale an asp.net app?
Thanks.
Yes asp.net is used in the real world. I have been following how Stackoverflow has been created since I first heard about it over a year ago and have taken away a lot of lessons. Following how stackoverflow will scale in future as their demand grows is pretty interesting and they are making a lot of their information public. Plus the podcasts are hilarious :)
Its hard to say how widespread ASP.NET is in the world but I think it is very widespread compared to PHP, Java and other server technologies. And I'm convinced that ASP.NET is as scalable as anything else you'll try.
If you wan't a starting point to read about ASP.NET performance you could take a look at chapter 6 of the P&P book "Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability". It's from 2004 so it might be a little outdated.
To give a couple of examples of high traffic sites running ASP.NET you just have to look at http://www.microsoft.com/ or http://stackoverflow.com/. if your site is smaller than these (and it probably is) scalability wont be you biggest concern. You should probably be more concerned about writing maintainable code.
I don't have numbers but based on the number of .net questions on so I'd say it's pretty common For your second question seehttp://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture
Over 9000.
Realistically I've run into many high traffic websites StackOverflow as an example that use ASP.NET
One thing that is useful for high scalability is the ability to add more servers if needed and still be able to maintain your current session using various ASP.NET session state technologies.
MySpace uses ASP.NET (source). A lot of big sites do. I would ignore the Plenty of Fish example though. From my recollection of stories I've read about it, they're just using HttpHandlers for output, skipping the Webforms stuff altogether. You could probably get Webforms to scale though if you absolutely had to. Most popular frameworks can handle high load, it just depends on the code and who's writing it. Anyone can program a site in any framework that won't scale but not vice versa.
As for how to scale, the biggest thing is caching, caching, caching. All big sites cache extensively. Facebook has thousands of servers just for caching. That's just a start though.
"MySpace uses ASP.NET (source). A lot of big sites do." Facebook uses PHP--a lot of big sites do.