Products

Solutions

Resources

Partners

Community

Blog

About

QA

Ideas Test

New Community Website

Ordinarily, you'd be at the right spot, but we've recently launched a brand new community website... For the community, by the community.

Yay... Take Me to the Community!

Welcome to the DNN Community Forums, your preferred source of online community support for all things related to DNN.
In order to participate you must be a registered DNNizen

HomeHomeDevelopment and...Development and...DNN Platform (o...DNN Platform (o...Turning on the Web Farm Without Multiple ServersTurning on the Web Farm Without Multiple Servers
Previous
 
Next
New Post
10/10/2009 5:49 PM
 

If you add a server in webservers table the web farm is turned on.

If it solve your problem I dont know.

 

 
New Post
10/12/2009 11:18 AM
 

Jan,  thanks for the advise.  I tried as you suggested and I expected under the Host Settings to see the 'Is Web Farm?'  report back true (or checked).   I installed a fresh install of version 5.1.4. In the web.config I set the 'EnableWebFarmSupport' = true.  I looked at the webservers table and noticed a record already in there for my current  server. so I tried a few things (I restarted the application each time I made a change so the new settings would take effect).

1) With 'EnableWebFarmSupport' = true and the record dnn created in the webserver table ... didn't work ('Is Web Farm' didn't show true on the Host Settings page)

2) With 'EnableWebFarmSupport' = true and 1 record in the webserver table BUT set the field 'enabled' to true and entered my portals URL into the 'URL' field... didn't work

3) Same as 2 but copied the record in the webserver table so I now had two records... didn't work, got error (Subquery returned more than 1 value) dnn also create another record in the webserver table, same as the first record it created  ('Enabled' was set to false and there was no value in the 'URL' field)

4) Same as 2 but I copied the first record (deleted all others) and this time changed the name of the 'ServerName' field so it didn't match the first record.... didn't work, but this cleared up the subquery error and dnn did not create any new records

5)Tried all of above but set the 'EnableWebFarmSupport' in the web.config file to false (who knows, maybe dnn wants to be the one to manage this) ... didn't work

6)Tried all of the above and turned the ASP session state service on and set it up in the web.config ... didn't work ...

 

So as you can see I am still missing something.  It's probably real simple.  Any ideas?

Thanks!

 
New Post
10/15/2009 9:03 PM
 

Ok, I finally got what I wanted!  I had to edit the source code, so that is not an optimum solution but it seems to be working just fine as a web garden and I have avoided that nasty performance bottle neck that has kept me from upgrading to dnn 5.1.x (I have multiple clients that run dnn on a single server but generate enough traffic where having only one worker process on a server is not feasable because it will lock up under a heavey load and some requests will not resolve).

My solution is a bit ugly and from what I can tell I'm the only one on these forums that is even using a web garden.  Essentially all I did was found a few properties in the dnn solution that have a name like 'IsWebFarm'  and hard coded them to be true. There are also two stored procedures UpdateServerActivity and UpdateServer that have a subquery to define the @ServerID varibable.  I add 'Select top 1' so when you enter a second record in the WebServers table (I just copied my first record, maybe it doesn't matter what the second one is, I haven't tested it, seems like it would matter though) so now I do not get the 'sub query returned more than 1 record' error. 

If you are going to set up a web garden be sure to set up  the state server in the web.config file ...

 <sessionState mode="StateServer" stateConnectionString="tcpip=localhost:42424" cookieless="false" timeout="20" />

And start the ASP State Server service. 

At any rate, hope this helps someone that may be having performance issues on a single server.

 

 
New Post
10/16/2009 3:40 AM
 

Hi Scott,

I am curious about this resolution to your problem.  ISTM that using the Web Garden has some quite large penalties (File based caching vs Memory, ASP State Service running and the communication to it vs simple data sitting in memory).  All of this additional work is happening on your one server.

Obviously you know your own workload better than anyone else.  I am surprised that making the one server do all this additional work is a net win over just (say) increasing the number of threads.   I am not an expert in this area, but I just skimmed this article (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5dws599a(VS.80).aspx) The scenario where they suggest a Web Garden includes...

 "If your application uses a slow database server or calls COM objects that have external dependencies (to name only two possibilities), it can be beneficial to enable Web gardening for your application. However, you should test how well your application performs in a Web garden before you decide to enable it for a production Web site."

...which seems highly unusual to me. 

Most of the recommendations on a single server seem to be saying that the standard defaults are fastest.


Best wishes,
- Richard
Agile Development Consultant, Practitioner, and Trainer
www.dynamisys.co.uk
 
New Post
10/16/2009 2:29 PM
 

Richard,

The issue I run into is I have a custom module that runs a report which can contain a larage amount of data and the query can take up to 10 seconds to run.  This is a popular page that our teachers use and when there are 20 or more hitting this at the same time we have seen that a single worker process can get overloaded and some users will get failed requests.  So I think my bottle neck is at the worker process and I don't understand how the threading works well enough to even know if additional IIS threads could be a help in this situation.  Sounds like the threading would be the silver bullet for IIS processesing but when IIS is waiting on non IIS processes it starts to pile up requests within a single worker process until external processes resolve (sounds like this could be the reason why the article you mentioned might have suggested the web garden usage).

We've optimised the page as well as we know to.  Much of the data is stored in a 'data mart' where it is already precalculated but the data is dynamic enough where we can not use the data mart for all situations so we end up with a 3 - 10 second query run time depending on what the user needs to see.  

If there is a better way I would LOVE to give up using the web gardens.

Thanks for your help!

Scott

 

 

 
Previous
 
Next
HomeHomeDevelopment and...Development and...DNN Platform (o...DNN Platform (o...Turning on the Web Farm Without Multiple ServersTurning on the Web Farm Without Multiple Servers


These Forums are dedicated to discussion of DNN Platform and Evoq Solutions.

For the benefit of the community and to protect the integrity of the ecosystem, please observe the following posting guidelines:

  1. No Advertising. This includes promotion of commercial and non-commercial products or services which are not directly related to DNN.
  2. No vendor trolling / poaching. If someone posts about a vendor issue, allow the vendor or other customers to respond. Any post that looks like trolling / poaching will be removed.
  3. Discussion or promotion of DNN Platform product releases under a different brand name are strictly prohibited.
  4. No Flaming or Trolling.
  5. No Profanity, Racism, or Prejudice.
  6. Site Moderators have the final word on approving / removing a thread or post or comment.
  7. English language posting only, please.
What is Liquid Content?
Find Out
What is Liquid Content?
Find Out
What is Liquid Content?
Find Out