Adrian Cooper wrote:
>
> Is anyone out there in iMS land using Website Pro for the frontend?
> Everywhere I go people seem to rave about Website Pro - any experience out
> there, and accordingly comments and observations?
>
Hi Adrian - I think you're going to find a number of people on
this list using WSP - starting with the man himself (Howie, of
course). I've used it for about four years and I haven't
regretted it for a second. I'm not the world's most technical
user (from a programming standpoint), which illustrates an
important point about WSP - it serves beginner, intermediate,
and professional/programmer users equally well. The phrase
"powerful yet easy to use" won't describe anything better than
it does WSP. My use of IIS has actually been limited because
I was spoiled by WSP - everytime I do something with IIS, I
find myself thinking "why is this so much harder to use?" Note
that's only through IIS4. Then there's the performance issues;
again, not being that technical, I'm not the best to comment,
but from what I recall, while many "credible" benchmarks rate
IIS better, but in a fairly sterile environment - from what I
understand (biased as I am), WSP performs much better in real
world settings, particularly in terms of scaling.
One of the best known high-volume users of WSP is Shiloh
Jennings, who you'll see post messages often on the WSP list,
host literally thousands of sites using WSP and is one of the
best resources I know of as to it's technical performance
capabilities - he's even written a number of utilities for WSP,
on his way to becoming a "folk hero" to WSP admins everywhere.
http://shiloh.shanje.com/
Incidentally, the WSP list is about as good a product support
list as you'll find - like this one - Bob Denny, the original WSP
developer, is even a semi-regular poster. Anyone even know who
the lead developer for IIS is? ;-)
In the interest of full disclosure, WSP is not without issues, as
any technical product has. There is still a nagging problem of
WSP "exiting" (literally, the service just goes away without a
trace) for some mysterious reason. I know that sounds very scary
(and it is), but until it's tracked and resolved by ORA (which I'm
sure they're working on), one of Shiloh's most popular utils is
designed to get around it http://shiloh.shanje.com/utils/websitealive/
Despite the problem, Shiloh sticks with WSP for his thousands of
sites rather than switch to IIS - I think that says something.
There's also a memory/thread consumption issue, though from what I
understand, the most likely culprit may not be WSP per se, but
ISAPI/WSAPI and ODBC issues (ie, using ASP, CF, iHTML with Access
rather than SQL on moderate-to-heavy traffic sites). And since
these app combos are also used with IIS, I believe similar problems
are seen with it. Again - I'm not tech expert, so take my assessment
as merely a general description (you might join the list and watch
for posts about these issues). However, I can say anecdotally that
when I switched my heaviest traffic merchant store from Access to
SQL7, WSP immediately stopped hitting max threads and crashing (which
it was doing on a daily basis by the time I switched. Not scientific,
but certainly dramatic evidence that WSP may not have been the problem.
BTW, Shiloh also wrote a util to help tweak the thread settings for WSP:
http://shiloh.shanje.com/utils/wsprotweaks/
All my sites are low to mid as far as traffic, so I personally can't say
WSP will absolutely do the job, but I can say from what I've seen and
read it will likely do the job far better than IIS.
> BTW - everyone says the same about the Serv-U FTP server - and having run that
> for a few weeks myself now I would have to agree entirely - it might even auth
> from ODBC - and even from inFusion if Howie ever has a mind to do that :-)
>
Another one I've been running for four years - so good I dream
that every piece of software I own was this stable... I think
if they improve the way virtual directories/paths are handled,
it could be the most perfect software for what it does that I've
seen (next to iMS...OF COURSE).
Hope that helps!
Regards,
Mike
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Gardiner $^> V: (650) 938-4688
SQUISH Internet Services FAX: (650) 938-4013
P.O. Box 391503 Internet Service
Mountain View, CA 94039-1503 Provider & Consulting
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.squish.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"Making the world a smaller place"
---------------------------------------------------------------------
========================================================================
This list server is Powered by iMS
'The Swiss Army Knife of Mail Servers'
--------------------------------------
To leave this list please complete the form at
http://www.CoolFusion.com/iMS.htm
List archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/infusion-email%40eoscape.com/
========================================================================
