Questions About V7.0 Hosted Performance vs V5.X

[drollins]

I am about to take the plunge and purchase your software to run a site for one of my customers and I want to make sure I am making a good decision. I do not want to build a site then find your software is too piggish and doesnt run on my hosted provider's network. I have had bad experiences with, for instance, DotNetNuke v4.X ASP V2.0 (which is a real pig) Asp.Net V2.0 where it simply consumes too many resources on the hosted box for my provider. The DNN V3.1 on ASP V1.1 works really well however: bottom line - I do not want to get burned.

On a positive note I am really impressed with this product without ever actually using it and desperately want it to work for this project.

So... here are my questions. Hopefully someone will be kind enough to answer them - thanks in advance.

1. I am looking for documentation on beta 7 (developer kit kind of stuff) -is this available or only after purchase (I see the 5.x docs)

2. In a shared hosted environment - what are the IIS configuration specs V7.0 - I would like to share these with my hosting provider to make sure that your solution will work on my hardware - how large a memory resource needs to be to allocated to the store in IIS for it to work properly and not time out or reset the asp environment too often - I know this depends on volume but I need to know a reasonable starting point.

3. For planning purposes, how much disk space does a store with 500 products with sales of say 50/week consume in SQL Server over the course of a year?

4. Does 5.5 or 7.0 consume less resources on the webserver. My experience to date tells me that ASP.Net V2.0 is more of a pig that V1.1. But as I understand it V7.0 uses alot of AJAX and I do not have a feel for that yet.

5. What have you done to optimize performance of your store on hosted environment - my understanding is that you specifically designed this thing to run in hosted environments well.

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello,

Thanks for your interest, your answers are below.

1. I am looking for documentation on beta 7 (developer kit kind of stuff) -is this available or only after purchase (I see the 5.x docs)

We currently only have the customization guide for the store. The developer kit will be available after final. We will work to answer any questions in the forums to help get everyone started.

2. In a shared hosted environment - what are the IIS configuration specs V7.0 - I would like to share these with my hosting provider to make sure that your solution will work on my hardware - how large a memory resource needs to be to allocated to the store in IIS for it to work properly and not time out or reset the asp environment too often - I know this depends on volume but I need to know a reasonable starting point.

The default IIS configuration is just fine, no changes will be needed.

Processor:
Minimum: P4, 1.8Ghz
Recommended: P4, 2 Ghz or higher

Memory:
Recommended: 1 GB or higher*

3. For planning purposes, how much disk space does a store with 500 products with sales of say 50/week consume in SQL Server over the course of a year?

A wild guess is all I can give you on this one somewhere between 250 and 500mb.

Code: Select all

4. Does 5.5 or 7.0 consume less resources on the webserver. My experience to date tells me that ASP.Net V2.0 is more of a pig that V1.1. But as I understand it V7.0 uses alot of AJAX and I do not have a feel for that yet. 

Load testing 5.5 and 7.0 on the same server showed that 7.0 was able to handle more requests per minute.

5. What have you done to optimize performance of your store on hosted environment - my understanding is that you specifically designed this thing to run in hosted environments well.

It's written to be fast period. Shared hosting or otherwise. It's well coded, we have db indexes where needed and we use query caching where appropriate. Our developers work extreamly hard to keep the view state size small ! Which is a chore in itself. If a page is found to be slow in testing it's optimized and recoded. We expecially work hard on the store facing pages. But even often used admin pages like /admin/category/browse.aspx there was considerable time spent making sure it was fast.

[Logan Rhodehamel]

I am going to throw in some additional notes.

2. In a shared hosted environment - what are the IIS configuration specs V7.0 - I would like to share these with my hosting provider to make sure that your solution will work on my hardware - how large a memory resource needs to be to allocated to the store in IIS for it to work properly and not time out or reset the asp environment too often - I know this depends on volume but I need to know a reasonable starting point.

Right now our shared public demo server is hosting over 190 installations of the AC7 beta. Granted these are probably not running a high volume. The memory usage of the worker process is around 250mb. The IIS application pool is set to recycle memory at 800 physical, 1400 virtual.... but this has not ever occurred according to the event logs.

The beta is not totally compatible with web gardens - you have to use a single worker process during periods of development. Some of our data is cached to the application state, and this is invalidated by multiple worker processes. The issue has yet to be looked at to see if we can / want to support this. Once a store is stable (no store setting changes or website edits) web gardens are OK.

If you are running in medium trust, you will also need WebPermission for features like the shipping (e.g. UPS) and payment gateways (e.g. Authorize.Net). Those features operate by interacting with remote servers through HTTP calls. This is disabled in default medium trust.

Also in medium trust, CyberSource and PayPal Express Checkout are currently unavailable. These use Microsoft WSE library, which cannot be accessed by partially trusted code. There are possible solutions to this, but we will not pursue it until after our release.

3. For planning purposes, how much disk space does a store with 500 products with sales of say 50/week consume in SQL Server over the course of a year?

I would like to provide you with some specific numbers using our sample data, but it will have to wait until after beta 2.

4. Does 5.5 or 7.0 consume less resources on the webserver. My experience to date tells me that ASP.Net V2.0 is more of a pig that V1.1. But as I understand it V7.0 uses alot of AJAX and I do not have a feel for that yet.

Well it seems that ASP.NET 2.0 has a bigger memory footprint than 1.1, but then this is not the only resource we have to worry about. In some cases, AC7 will have less impact than our prior version. For example in AC55 we were using ODBC. With AC7, we are using the native sql client. For AC55, digital delivery was a memory hog for large files. For AC7, we use a vastly improved routine for streaming files with very low memory usage, and supports resumable downloads. In AC55, there was overhead related to what was known as the "master" database. Since each installation could manage multiple stores, the first requirement of every request was to figure out what store and database we needed to access, and configure necessary connections for the request. In AC7, all of this overhead is eliminated.

As Mike mentioned above, in load tests which were based on shopping and purchasing activities, AC7 outperformed AC55. That's really the metric we are most interested in.

5. What have you done to optimize performance of your store on hosted environment - my understanding is that you specifically designed this thing to run in hosted environments well.

Writing to work under medium trust was a big part of it. Also we wanted it to work with an FTP based deploy. Those were the primary goals that were specific to hosting. The remaining optimization, these are issues we care about regardless of the server environment.