Back to VSLive! San Francisco Show Daily Home

MSDN Redux With 64-Bit Servers and ASP.NET 2.0 (Continued)

Oakley reckoned that the ASP version caused "the 404 page [to be] one of the most popular pages on MSDN" and moving to ASP.NET 2.0 has solved this problem. The current content is expected to have a lifetime of 10 to 15 years, which minimizes "not found" occurrences. Oakley also described how MSDN has replaced unfriendly GUIDS in document URLs with more easily typed eight-digit unique identifiers. Oakley also said that you can use custom URL aliases, such as …microsoft.com/system.string, but I wasn't able to find the magic prefix to make the alias work.

Drilling down on the rendering and delivery topics, Oakley cited these-ASP.NET 2.0 advantages:

• High-performance rendering
• Smaller data center footprint
• Adaptive caching for less frequently used pages
• Master pages for varied delivery
  • 'Chromeless' rendering in the application's UI, such as VS 2005's F1 online help
  • Printer-friendly output
  • Optimized for search engines
  • Firefox friendliness
• Rating and feedback mechanism available on every page

Oakley said that the current system provided a "several-fold" performance increase. MSDN is now delivering 130 requests per second to 6,000 concurrent users with a mean rendering time 0.4 seconds (worst case) with no page caching—in this case, each request fetches the page from the database server and renders it to each user.

Moving to 64-bit hardware for the operating system, rendering, and database was a major contributor to the improved performance and reduced the number of servers required. The data center topology employs 16 Web servers and four SQL Servers for redundancy, but two Web servers and a single database server can handle the current load. In normal operation, the output rendering cache increases to about 10 GB RAM after a day of operation, so the cache delivers most pages much more quickly than 0.4 seconds. A single staging server database uses an indexed view and replication to update 300,000 pages on all database servers in about 45 minutes.

Taking Advantage of Web Service and Database Features
Jordan expanded on his explanation of the forthcoming MSDN Web services that he originally described at VSLive! 2005 Orlando and that came on line (privately) in late January. When the Web services become publicly available later this year, they'll offer these features:

• Web service interface supports
  • Add VS 2005 Web Reference
  • A variety of cross-platform SOAP toolkits
  • RESTful Ajax interfaces
• Complete services for
  • Content discovery
  • Search
  • Metadata
  • Features
  • Images
  • Ratings
  • Aggregation

Jordan then demonstrated a simple Windows form Web service client to consume the MSDN services. Keep an eye on the MSDN Lab home page for MSDN Web services availability (see Resources). Another group is in the process of creating a developer preview of a rich WinFX MSDN Web service client that takes full advantage of Windows Presentation Services.

Finally, Jordan described the new SQL Server 2005 features that contributed to the MSDN makeover:

• READFAST locking hints to skip records that are locked, which is great for rolling your own queue
• OUTPUT clause that writes values resulting from INSERTR, UPDATE or DELETE statements to a specified table variable or temporary table
• Persisted computed columns that permit compound columns to reside in the data page
• Include keywrokd on CREATE INDEX statement
• Common Table Expressions (CTEs) that enable recursive queries or simplify redundant table joins

The Jordan and Oakley test-case presentation might have been improved by providing before-after-ASP.NET 2.0 comparison metrics and detailed specifications for the datacenter hardware and its configuration. Regardless of this omission, the two team leaders made a strong case for upgrading to the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition for large-scale, Web-based content management systems.

About the Author
Roger Jennings is an independent XML Web service and database developer and author. Roger's latest book is Expert One-on-One Visual Basic 2005 Database Programming for WROX/Wiley. He's also a Visual Studio Magazine contributing editor and FTPOnline columnist, and manages the OakLeaf Systems XML Web Services demonstration site (www.oakleaf.ws) and Weblog (oakleafblog.blogspot.com). His Code of Federal Regulations Web services won Microsoft's 2002 .NET Best Horizontal Solution Award. Reach Roger at .