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Pedro
Asked: 2010-08-12 08:25:22 +0800 CST

Should I use IIS for High Traffic WebApp

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My company is planning one new big web app.

We are expecting around 250K hits per day in the first month.

I'm used to work with large traffic sites, but using Apache and Lighttpd, etc.

But for this project the client want .NET to be the tool. So I'm really sceptic about IIS as Webserver.

What is your advise? Use IIS? How to scale IIS? Is it possible do handle this amount of Traffic? The versions of IIS in Windows 2003 are diferent from the ones in Windows 2008?

Regards,
Pedro

windows-server-2008 windows-server-2003 iis web

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You'll probably want to go with Server 2008 since that has IIS7. Don't buy the FUD about IIS. When was the last time you heard about microsoft.com being down?

    Poke around on the netcraft.com site and you'll not be skeptical anymore.

    Here is a great resource about what's coming up in the Web Farm Framework for IIS 7 that has to do with scaling, load balancing, and provisioning.

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  2. The answer here is yes use IIS for a .NET hosting project .... you can see how stack overflow is configured here http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/

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  3. 250k hits is a fair number. You'll need more than IIS or Apache to make it work - mainly expertise. Anyone can bring up a webserver and run it, but to run it well you need the experience of all its foibles (and you'll think IIS has more than most if you come from a *nix background).

    eg. Slashdot serves 4 million pages per month, and they have a large infrastructure. You're looking to be a fifth the size! So whilst IIS can do it, the bigger question is whether you can do it. You'll need to learn a lot of brand new technologies and chances are your solution will not be as good as the stuff you're used to, it'll also take you a lot longer.

    So, if I was a businessman selling this, I'd try to make them change their minds - show them your existing customer sites, example data from large systems, inform them of the risks in a new platform. Its not as if you can't do the work in a non-.NET toolset, its not as if there are very few web devs who don't know .NET, there's little reason to go with it, in this case.

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