Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Capacity Planning

In many ways, capacity planning for IIS 8.0 is a guessing game. Benchmarking, testing a configuration and saving the results, then making a change and testing again so that the results can be compared, is crucial. However, it's sometimes impossible to test an application on IIS 8.0 if the application is still under development. There are load-testing tools available that can test IIS 8.0 response, and they may or may not make sense in your capacity planning.

IIS 8.0 itself is capable of handling tens of thousands of requests per second. In real-life situations, however, this number is impossible to meet. Bottlenecks can occur at many points in the serving of a request—accessing a back-end database; retrieving data from a mainframe, or an ERP or CRM application; even hardware and network layer delays can reduce the number of serviceable requests.

A common question is, “How many websites can I host on my server?” That question simply cannot be answered with a definitive number. The type of site, the data contained on it, popularity, connection speed, and hardware it runs on are all factors. But a general rule of thumb that works for many hosting companies is that only 15 percent of the sites on a server will be active at a time. That means that you can exceed the estimated capacity of a server by about eight times and be safe. Naturally, for a low-cost web host, maximizing the number of clients on a single server is the way to maximize profits.

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