According to Microsoft, the www.microsoft.com web site gets 20 million page views per day[1]. That's some 4 million short of your definition of large. (Remember that they have an international audience, so their usage patterns are not compressed into an 8 hour space.)
So you're saying that www.microsoft.com is not a large web site? In any case I think your reasoning here is suspect: >1 million page views a day, lets say over a period of 8 hours > (to account for spikes etc.) are 125000 page views an hour. Judging by every web site and internet link usage graph I've ever looked at, you don't get uniform distributions like this. I understand that you've compressed the day's traffic into working hours, which will give a higher 'average hits per second' figure than averaging it out over the whole day, but I think you will still be underestimating the peakiness of the load - you usually see spikes in the morning and at lunch time. (On the other hand if your web site has international readership, it will be a bit more spread out. You'll have more peaks of course, but they'll be less high.) At peak times you should expect well over 35 page views a second. (Well, assuming your server can cope with the load... A lot of servers slow down at lunch time.) I tend to think of web sites as being (very approximately) one of: (1) Dead (e.g. no page views most days) (2) Piffling (a few, maybe a few hundred) (3) Light load (a few thousand) (4) Non-trivial load (5) Large (6) Huge (1) through (3) would not be worth putting on their own server. (E.g. most personal web sites, and most small company web sites.) My criteria for moving into (5) is approximately when you really need more than one server to handle the load. (And I mean *need*, as opposed to using multiple servers because it's cheaper than making one server work properly. It's surprising how much bandwidth a single server can chuck out if the site is designed well.) I'd say that a million hits a day was easily in category (5). A million an hour is definitely (6), but how many of those are there? Not even Microsoft get a million page views an hour on average. [1] http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/inside.htm -- Ian Griffiths DevelopMentor ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Tomiczek" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2002 7:13 AM Subject: Re: [DOTNET] ASP.NET's Application object: does it scale? "Over a million page views per day" and "large site" should NOT be mentioned in one sentence. Make your large site a million page views an HOUR and you talk of a site that starts to be large. 1 million page views a day, lets say over a period of 8 hours (to account for spikes etc.) are 125000 page views an hour. That sounds impressive until you divide it by the 3600 seconds an hour has. 35 page views a second. Hardly impressive. -----Original Message----- From: Monsur Hossain [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] I've been reading a lot of resources[1][2] advocating the use of ASP.NET's Application object to store a global data cache. This limits hits to the database. However I'm skeptical of the Application object's ability to scale to larger sites with over a million page views a day. In our current web application (using just ASP), we've made it a rule not to use Application/Sessions in order to gain that tiny performance edge. Anyone have any facts/opinions regarding .NET's Application object as a data cache? Anyone have a better way? Thanks, Monsur [1] http://www.fawcette.com/vsm/2002_04/magazine/columns/aspnet/ [2] http://www.devx.com/premier/mgznarch/vbpj/2002/02feb02/ws0202/ws0202- 1.asp You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
