First of all I would like to say that we've been using DNN for about 3 years now for lots of our client's websites and it has been fantastic. However, most of these sites have been fairly small both in terms of # pages, # of registered users, and # of page views per month/day.
We're working on a site for a new client that is expecting 20,000 to 100,000 page views per month and I'm trying to evaluate if DNN can handle this type of load effectively. I've searched around on the forums here for answers to some performance and scalability questions, but so far I haven't found a lot of definitive answers. I know the dotnetnuke.com site handles a lot of users, but on what hardware/software configuration?
Our plan for this site it to have a dedicated Windows 2003 server machine with a fast dual-core processor and ~ 2 GB RAM. This machine will host both the DNN site and the SQL Server 2005 database. For all intensive purposes, this will be the only website hosted on this machine.
I'm looking for some feedback from you guys about what the recommended IIS 6, ASP.NET, and SQL Server 2005 configuration should be to get the best performance out of the latest DNN (4.5.4). I'm assuming DNN should be run inside it's own IIS AppPool, with it's own user account, but type of AppPool settings have you guys found to work best in terms of memory limits, recycle times, etc? Are there any SQL Server indexing / tuning steps I can do that will speed up DNN dramatically? Should I use the memory or disk cache?
I've seen a lot of posts with comments like "DNN can handle X load as long as you have IIS configured correctly" but no-one ever seems to say what a "correct" IIS configuration is!!
I'd also be interested to know what type of performance testing tools others have used to load-test DNN sites. So far I have experimented with the "Web Test" tools in Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite.
Thanks very much for your feedback!