The forums are an evolving resource. I agree that theres room for improvement, it's something we've been talking about at a few coreteam chats. Some of the things likely to happen include the collapsing of some of the forums together i.e. the "using the ..." and "developing the..." project subforums can be combined. Also we've discussed moving all the project forums to another page so that the current forums page lists the most common forums.

Personally I'd like to see 2 agregatted views, one for all the general forums, and one for all the other forums - this would help stop project specific posts clutter up general topics (and as the project teams all subscribe to their forum posts, it would limit the impact of the relevant people viewing the posts).

Long term, I'd also like to see an 'unanswered posts' view which either gave a list of posts without an answer, or ideally we evolve the forums so that the original poster/moderators can 'close' a succesfully answered thread (much like at the msdn.microsoft.com/forums). As the forum is a coremodule, improvements such as this are possible, as Crispy's and his team are only an email away :)

athal

Mariette,

I don't have much experience with web gardens, but AFAIK their performance boost is mostly noticeable when your site is busy, as the additional worker process(s) stops unnecessary queuing and contention for resources (see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/659f2e2c-a58b-4770-833b-df96cabe569e.mspx?mfr=true )

Web-gardens are also state sensitive, as each worker process is isolated from each other, meaning theyre treated effectively as seperate applications (hence the problem with sessions, and requirement for an out of state session store - or the other options I outlined). I would expect that you would have to configure your server as though you were using a webfarm, but I haven't had a chance to try this out.

Cathal