Hello,

I am trying to take my development web farm configuration to a production web farm, and having terrible performance issues. I have 2 win2003 servers in dev connected to a dev sql 2005 server. They are sharing a directory on one of the dev web servers via UNC for the DNN file store. It's being load balanced by an F5 BigIP box. performance seems ok. Now i am trying to configure the Production web farm with the same application. So far i have

3 internal win2003 web servers Dual Dual core, 4gb ram

1 external DMZ win 2003 web server, same spec.

SQL 2005 cluster w/san storage

File Server cluster for DNN files w/san storage

F5 BigIP round robin load balancing

I dont see antivirus on these boxes yet. DNN runs, but slowly. watching perfmon i see spikes in Memory Pages/Sec in the 4-800 range on any page access to any web server. I am using an AD account to run the DNN app. Created an App pool using this account, set it to use 4 processes (web garden). I cant install modules as they just time out. Page refreshes take an extreme amount of time. The load page with no modules takes 5-8 seconds usually. The login screen takes 30+ seconds to load. I have run the MIcrosoft Windows 2003 Performance Advisor, under the IIS reports it says TCP/IP is using a process other than the expected IIS-related processes to send/recieve traffic. CPU load is very low, available memory is over 3 gigs, highest disk i/o is less than 100/sec. I have implemented the same security config in dev as in prod, same steps followed.

these numbers were from when i targetted one of the servers and bypassed the F5. I read that last file access update may be causing too much overhead for UNC shared web sites, so i turned it off. The Memory Pages/Sec seems to be lower but the site doesnt seem to perform any faster. I still cant get modules to install. I have turned on impersonation in the web.config and used the AD account DNN is running under. The DBA's say the db were connecting to isnt being stressed, its shared with other applications and pretty beefy.

The only other standout i see from the performance advisor is under HTTP Response Time Statistics "Customer ISAPI" has a response time of 10,124 (ms), I dont see any ISAPI filters listed for the web site in IIS MMC. I also dont see 404/500 errors, or any others from the web servers. I did see a blurb (an old one) that said the network service account needed access to the DNN root to check permissions, could this be an issue, as i am not using network service but an AD user for everything. I would expect a security error if this was the case.

Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

DDA

Thanks for the info. I had configured the web garden as a possible solution, but it hasnt made any difference either way. Currently AD auth isnt being used, i couldnt get the module to install for DNN, it always times out. My applicaiton pool is configured to use the AD account that DNN uses. It's been given permissions to all the appropriate local system resources. I have never really trusted file mirroring/replication so the backend is a clustered file server, and set up as per guidance from MS.

thinking it might be security related to the file system, i gave everyone read access to the file store, hopefully if Network Service needs to query file permissions even if asp isnt using it that would help, it didnt seem to. I tried tracing last night but really wasnt getting much info from it. Maybe it was the hour, i'll look into it again.

Thanks again,

David