Is ASP.Net a technology suitable for high-load sites?

Question

That's the question... Do you think ASP.Net is a technology suitable for high-load sites? Do you know any populer sites -apart from stackoverflow, of course- built with this technology? Thanks.

Answer 1

MySpace, Orkut, ASP.NET Forums, Microsoft.com, ...

ASP.NET has great caching and load balancing features that make it suitable for high load Web sites.

It's also a very flexible, well-designed framework. If you don't like part of it, or think its performance intensive for your high load application, you can just throw out that layer and replace it with your own. If you don't like WebControls and Pages due to its overhead, you are able to write your own HttpHandlers.

Basically, I think ASP.NET MVC is going to be a better platform for high load and customized Web sites, since it can be more hand tuned (relative to ASP.NET pages that try to abstract away the resulting HTML, for good reasons) and works better with AJAX applications. WebControls and ViewState are two parts that usually face criticism that are pretty much gone away in MVC.

Answer 2

monster.com, newegg, most news sites, and many more!

Answer 3

ASP.NET gets a bad rap in the "Web 2.0" world. MySpace has 50 million+ users and I'd call that "high load."

I think that, like just about any other web technology, the capability of the tool lies in the hands of the developer creating for it. If ASP.NET developers ignore caching and load balancing, the app won't handle load, and it won't be ASP.NET's fault.

Answer 4

As well as the above answers, The Code Project is an ASP.NET site.

Answer 5

ASP.NET is definitely a good platform for high load sites, but keep a wary eye on those "Ajax" extensions. They pretend to do partial page postbacks but they have all the load of a full page postback.

Answer 6

The answer is "yes and maybe". Can it handle it? Most definitely. ASP.NET has a lot of features. With a lot of features, there is a lot that can be done poorly in a site. A large-volume site needs careful design consideration and planning to make sure that it is both horizontally and vertically scalable. Chances are, if you just shoot from the hip and are doing any actual processing on the server-side, you will eventually end up in a world of hurt.

We love the .NET Framework, and are thrilled with the flexibility and power of it - ASP.NET, whether backed by C# or VB.NET is a stable and feature-rich platform. For more of the nuts and bolts around performance concerns, I strongly recommend Microsoft's Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability. You can additionally download a completely free ebook of the content, as well.

Answer 7

When people ask if ASP.NET sites can handle large traffic, I often refer them to plentyoffish.com. The site has massive traffic and runs on a handful of servers. It's famous for having operated for years on two servers --- one to serve up images and one to handle everything else.