Questions[web-services](server)

We'are going to join 2 (two) IIS7 web-servers into NLB with the same web-service published (2 instances of the same web-service one per web-server).

• Do I understand correctly, that NLB will work for my web-services, delegating web requests to one or another instance?
• How will NLB work if one of web service instances becomes unavailable (i.e. starts to throw SOAP exceptions or HTTP errors)?
• Will NLB take into account the average web service response time to decide the web-service instance to delegate processing?

Thank you in advance!

I am always curious about how large-scale live web application updates are done. Since the application is live, that is why it complicates everything -you should not down your service and at the same time you should recover the activity/changes (in database etc.) made on your site to the new version during the update later on.

The first and most natural technique comes to the mind is that redirecting all the requests to some other replicated server, so that you can update original server without shutting-down your service.

I just wonder is there any other smarter techniques to handle updates in a live web service. Please, share your experience and opinions guys!

One of our apps is calling a third-party webservice which has recently been switched to a different URI. We need to investigate this to try and see where the old address is being used (the code/config has been modified to the new one already). Is there a quick and lightweight way of logging any outbound HTTP requests the server is making?

Its an ASP.Net application running on Windows 2008 Server with IIS 7.

My company has a web service api which is starting to get a lot of use. Recently we had some issues with running out of memory. We optimized some inefficient code and solved the problem.

We know we are going to expand even further, we want to have a good way to deal with the intense traffic.

One idea that has come up is to have different url's for some of our heavier customers. This just jumps out as the wrong thing to do to me. The url's in some cases would point to isolated servers, but some would also just point to more virtual directories.

Is this a good solution to the problem in either case? I'm forseeing horrible maintainability issues and causing more problems then it solves. Please give me some pros and cons for both sides.

This is already on a load balanced server farm.

Right now we only have one back-end server per site/web service. I'd be interested to hear people's experiences with various load balancer apps (something that runs on Linux).

What would you recommend?