Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5

Chapter 8. Improving Server-Side Performance and Scalability

Running a large consumer web application for a mass audience is challenging, to say the least. You will face many scalability, maintainability, extensibility, and performance challenges as you grow from hundreds to thousands to, eventually, millions of users. As the number of concurrent users grows, you will face challenges in software that will require significant re-engineering and sometimes a rewrite of major components. Any type of re-engineering or rewrite of components becomes very expensive in the later stages of the project when you have a production site running and performing poorly. You have to go through rigorous impact analysis, careful coding while maintaining backward-compatibility, and many rounds of regression testing. So, acknowledging such challenges up front while the project is small, and provisioning for them will help mitigate complexity later in the project and save a lot of time and money.

Before you address scalability, maintainability, and performance issues, the first thing you need is very good instrumentation, which includes logging, performance metrics, and exception handling. You will first have to log key areas of your application before you can identify where the bottleneck is and what kind of problems your users are facing on the production site. Remember, there’s no way to attach a Visual Studio debugger on a production site, set the breakpoint, and debug the application while thousands ...