Under the Covers: Architecture at AnandTech and the Performance of ASP.NET
by Jason Clark on November 27, 2004 12:10 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Scalability of the website
Since the site went live with the new ASP.NET framework, we've constantly been monitoring the servers and tracking statistics, and to say that we've been impressed is an understatement. We've had near 99% up-time and have seen dramatic increases in performance and scalability of the site infrastructure. Each of our clustered servers use an average of 12% CPU, and each server has at least 450 users on them at any given time. Pages execute in an average of 15ms, which is 60-80ms better than what we used to do.To track our statistics, we wrote a performance counter monitor that resides on each server. It essentially writes the output of various performance counters to an aspx page, which we then feed into a database and run reports, view trends and monitor new versions of the site code as they are put into play.
Last week, we performed a test on scalability, to see how scalable one server was in the cluster. We monitored a server in the cluster for a period of 10 minutes while all five servers were in the web cluster. Next, we shut off four of the servers leaving one to serve the load for the website. Below is a table of the before and after of this test - impressive results in our opinion.
| Performance Counter | Before (5 servers in the cluster) |
After (1 server in the cluster) |
| CPU Usage | 5% | 30% |
| Concurrent Users | 450 | 2400 |
| Requests per second | 12 | 80 |
| Average request time (ms) | 15 | 18 |
As you can see, ASP.NET is very efficient. CPU usage climbed to 30%, not much considering nearly 2000 more users were on the server. Request per second were 7 times higher and our average page request times were still approximately the same, showing the efficiency of the ASP.NET runtime and the scalability of the website itself.
The migration has been successful, but there is always something else to do with a site of this size. We have a meeting at CES in January to talk about future plans. There will be, more than likely, new functionality to plan for and architect (what I live for). We're also going to take a look at a possible firewall upgrade next year. We've managed to hit our 18,000 simultaneous sessions limit twice in the past few months; once, we sustained 65Mbit/second of throughput for a few hours.
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rayon - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
have you guys considered using the Tracing mechanisms of ASP.NET instead of writing your own debugging class?Hudo - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
What's up with the 2 paragraphs per page anymore? I mean before you know it, they're be one sentence per page?!I just found it irritating.
kamper - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
"It was music to our ears that [FuseTalk] decided to port their product to ASP.NET."Heh, that sounds a little funny coming from you, Jason. Was it entirely a coincidence?
Thanks for an interesting and informative article. I think that anyone bashing you for it is probably just jealous of your job ;)
Jason Clark - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
#7 Yep, it wasn't the first time we've had high throughput. We've done 40+ quite a few times, sometimes they last a good portion of the day.#10 A comparo between languages is a very very touchy subject. You can easily run into legality issues, especially if the test isn't 100% fair on both sides. The trickier part comes in writing code that identically architected on both sides of the fence. The minute you use an optimized method in one language and not another, the test isn't fair. Here we're just showing from a performance metrics point what we've gained and how scalable we are.
#4 I'm sorry you took the article that way. We don't write these for any other reason than to let people see what we do, and hopefully learn from it. We are by no means perfect and have made our own fair share of mistakes. Bad code, poor choices in platform, we've been there and done that. We're learning just as much as anyone else in this industry does.
petrusbroder - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
As a regular reader I really enjoy the articles, tests and comments. Sometimes I am just amazed over the fact that the comments tell so much more about the writers themselves.It is as if I were in a waiting room where all those who have problems suddenly woke up and - against their normally well developed ability and well defended right to protect their integrity - started "tell and show".
Every day sombody makes my day. In Sweden we have a saying: "Ett gott skratt förlänger livet" - "a good laugh prolongs the life" - probably I'll get to be at least a 100!
To the writers of the reviews and articles: thanks, I like your work; not only the contenst but the mix as well.
To those who comment: I just love it: sometimes because the comments elucidate technical issues, sometimes because the comments prolong my life!
overclockingoodness - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
By competition, you mean get other sites to benchmark their servers (like Toms or Slashdot). I don't think those sites would be interested in this as they have nothing to gain from it. Besides, they would not give access to Jason to their back-end servers to make changes and alter. :)I think we are thinking too far ahead. :-)
Reflex - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
I am curious as to what they were using beforehand. I would love to see a 'real world' site such as this compare .NET to some of the competition, although it may be more work than they would be willing to undertake.overclockingoodness - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
#7: Sorry about that. It just annoyed me that people can't appreciate the work AnandTech puts into their articles and all their hard work gets labeled as "kissing your own ass". :)#8: Are you saying that you were intentionally trying to be a troll? I don't think it would be boring. People could discuss some things in the comments section without having to read through your and my posts bickering back and forth.
msva124 - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
Without at least one good troll, the comments section for this article would be very boring.Ardan - Sunday, November 28, 2004 - link
Whoa, easy there tiger (#6). He's stupid, we know, and probably a troll too. No need to get so feisty about it. I'm sure Jason knows we appreciate the articles, since we are always curious just what keeps this site running consistently well :).I was surprised that you have used 64Mbit/second of throughput for a few hours once...wow!