In the next week we will be rolling out our DNN implementation into a Web Farm environment. This is explicitly supported by DNN (it even has its own installation pdf ) - so hopefully there won't be any pitfalls. This implies that the DNN team has already given thought to making DNN work in a distributed manner with consideration for caching. Of cource there are caveats like use disk caching and a centralised file store. But don't these lessons carry across to the web garden scenario. In my opinion web gardens are simpler than web farms. At the very least file resources are located on the same physical machine. I would have guessed that web gardens would work with a similair configuration. That is, common file store and disk caching but separate memory resources.

Any views?
 

We are running into issues with "Web Garden" setting as well.  All ASP .NET tuning articles recommend enabling "Web Garden" setting.  Since DNN is built on top of .NET, is there anything special in DNN that prevents making this setting unusable.  Is it that this setting is not supported with the default configuration, but may be some other changes are required in web.config file that would make it work.  We are running our site on 4 CPU servers and not being able to use this setting is preventing us from taking full advantage of our server.  I read an article that states the following side effects of Web Gardening.  If disk caching is used and all processors write to one file system, then I am confused as to what is preventing this from working?

• If your application uses session state, it must choose an out-of-process provider (NT Service or SQL).
• Application state and application statics are per process, not per computer.
• Caching is per process, not per computer.

Please advise.

Thanks,

Chhavi

Yeah, I hear you Mariette... in fact I'm kind of in the same boat here.  You'd probably have a hard time finding it in print anywhere, but we've actually been somewhat discouraged from trying to utilize web gardens do to the nature of other complications that can beset it (e.g session state, although DNN discourages that also).  It's not something I have looked into recently at all.

Scott Willhite, Co-Founder DNN