Prior to dnn 5.1.x turning on the web farm would activate file based caching.  This is very helpful when running a web garden on a single machine.  The web garden (yes I mean 'garden' in this case, not web farm) gives your app multiple processes to run in so if one locks up or takes awhile users are routed to another worker process and avoid a nasty bottle neck.  The file based caching is the key to making this work since each worker process needs to know when to update its own cache. 

The problem I am having in dnn 5.1.x is the web farm seems to be set up differently and I can't get it to turn on, thus the file based invalidation is not turning on either.  Is there a way to turn on file based invalidation outside of the web farm? 

Also, I heard rumors that the community edition no longer supports web farms.  I have confirmed with the dnn professional group that this is not true.  Community does provide web farm support as well.  Does anyone know how to set up the new webfarm configuration to work on a single server?  This too may get me what I need.  I have only seen docs that explain the old (prior to 5.1.x) way of configuring the web farm.  This way always worked prior to 5.1.x but not now.

Any help is much appreciated.

Scott

Thanks for the reply Mitch.  We have never had an issue using web gardens in the prior to 5.1.x configurations.  We have many installs that we do for schools around the nation and we find that it is critical to have multiple worker processes otherwise we see bottlenecks with dnn with as little as 16 concurrent users when running a module that is somewhat database intensive (queries in the 3-6 second timeframe to execute).  Without the multiple worker processes the application crashes (requests timeout) under this kind of load.  With the web garden we can sustain multiple hundreds of concurrent users without an application crash because requests don't have to all wait in a single file line but can be processed in tandem.  It would seem overkill to me to set up a web farm for 16 concurrent users but I am very desirerous to learn how I can better configure dnn to avoid these type of bottlenecks.

Also if I can get the file based caching to work I still think my problem is solved.  Any ideas out there as to what the issue might be?  

Thanks,

Scott