The Elcom Blog : WindowsServer, Elcom

Improving Redundancy, Stability and Performance

Angus McDonald — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:45:38 GMT

We believe very strongly in continuous improvement at Elcom as it forms a core value of our Agile development process. Anthony hinted at the significant changes to our website hosting infrastructure we have been making as part of our commitment to continuous improvement. These changes are mostly transparent to our clients, and have so far involved larger uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), more powerful servers and a rollout of Windows Server 2008 across our hosting servers.

The largest changes are still ahead of us and will involve measures designed to greatly improve the redundancy, stability and performance of our hosting infrastructure. The aim is to give clients a hosting service that is more fault tolerant, so that equipment failures do not affect website serving, user sessions or client data.

The first step is to create a completely redundant network infrastructure that supports transparent failover so that if one part of the network infrastructure (a cable, router, switch, firewall, Internet connection or network card) fails, there is a seamless transition to using the redundant hardware/software, with at worst a slight drop in throughput or peak capacity. In fact performance overall will improve as we remove some redundant network layers from our infrastructure. This step will be completed in the next few weeks, unfortunately with one or two very brief (2-5 minutes) outages across all hosted websites. (Key gains: additional redundancy, performance improvements)

The next step is to implement a high-availability, load-balanced web server cluster that will serve all Community Manager.NET websites that are in our current shared hosting servers.

High-availability
When you can lose a server from a cluster without it affecting the overall job of that cluster then it is said to be "high-availability". We will start with three servers in this cluster which means that even if two of the servers have a problem simultaneously we will still be able to serve client websites as if nothing happened.
Load-balanced
Load-balancing across servers means that peaks and troughs in traffic and workload are shared across servers. This means that if one client's website gets a sudden deluge of traffic the load can be shared across all three web servers, meaning there is less net effect on the capacity to serve client's websites (both their's and others).

Another big bonus of this change is that it includes implementing "out of process" user session handling which means we will be able to upgrade Community Manager.NET websites without requiring an outage as users' sessions will not be affected by a re-start of the website on any one server. This is an exciting development, as it will mean less need for website outages in the future as we continue to grow and expand on our hosting service. (Key gains: additional redundancy, greater stability)

The last step is for us to upgrade the current server that mirrors our main database server to have the same specification as that server (which is by far the biggest server we have). This will help ensure that database performance in a failover situation is maintained at the same level it is normally. (Key gains: additional redundancy, performance improvements)

Our strategy in the future will be to add web servers to the cluster, and bring online new mirrored database servers as demand for our hosting services continues to grow. We will also be upgrading our staging environment to have a similar (but less powerful) web server cluster to improve the performance of staging sites.

Do you want to know more about Elcom's website hosting service?

ELCOM: More on Windows 2008, SQL 2008, VS 2008

CraigBailey — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:40:00 GMT

Earlier this week I mentioned Elcom had moved everything over to 2008 (that is, our product - Community Manager.NET - is now targeting .NET 3.5 in Visual Studio 2008, and our site is running on Windows Server 2008 with SQL Server 2008 on the back end).

Initial thoughts were that the site was running a bit quicker. Turns out we were wrong. The site is actually running a lot quicker.

One of our techies, Alan Lee, set up a testing environment so that we could start measuring the performance improvements. You can check out his method here, and his results here. This is only the start of his testing mind you, and there are a few caveats to note (in regard to CPU usage).

But the results are stunning.

Bottom line: The Elcom site is now running over 5 times faster.

Technorati Tags: Elcom Technology, Community Manager.NET, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008

ELCOM: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008

CraigBailey — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:38:00 GMT

Elcom is all 2008.

The Elcom web site is now running on a Windows 2008 Server, with SQL Server 2008 as the back-end and Community Manager.NET completely recompiled under Visual Studio 2008 (targeting the 3.5 Framework) delivering the content.

Community Manager.NET is Elcom's content management system (CMS), which we have now re-compiled, tested and released on the .NET 3.5 Framework.

Now, you might think this is a pretty simple thing to do, but there's actually a reasonable amount of work involved to ensure it is all performing smoothly. I won't go into the details here, but suffice to say, when you have a mature product (Community Manager is in its 5th year of development) there's a fair bit of code that needs to be checked. Third party tools, and rarely used custom modules only add to the mix.

Additionally, running it on two products that are still not yet released (Windows 2008 and SQL 2008) brings its own share of fun :-) The main hassles have been in getting up to speed with a few of the Windows 2008 Server settings, some of which Brad and Alan have noted.

And, to be honest, there are still a few little issues with the site... (can you find them?).

It's a little early to be talking about the advantages and performance improvements that the updates provide, but we'll report back in the coming months with issues and improvements.

Technorati Tags: Elcom Technology, Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, .Net framework 3.5