Your comments about a customized build of DNN are interesting, as I’ve often thought about doing something similar. I once ran the SQL Profiler on a standard DNN install out-of-the-box and was shocked to see the number of database hits that were being generated!

We have about 40 databases and 80 sites running on a single Dell machine with 4 GB RAM that handles IIS/ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005. So far it has been reliable but we’re definitely starting to feel the "pinch" and I’m thinking it’s time for a new box.

Keep up the great work! I’d love to see more posts like this in the future

@ Kevin – Ok – At the moment we have two machines, one HP running sql2000 & web combined and another my older Dell box running just sql 2005. We have 12gb of ram on the HP box, but I think the HP box has been more reliable overall and robust perhaps is a better word than the dell. We are shortly going to deploy a new SQL box on a Sun server with SAS drives, as the Dell has SATA and I think that was a bit of a mistake – and the hard drive array is not optimised as I would like, based on my experience now with server hard drive configuration, backups and traffic in general.

Until mid last year – I had 120 DBS and about 180 DNN sites on the HP Proliant box and it was doing fine – except I felt we were peaking and needed to add more ram and the time had come to split them up.

Ideally I would have liked to have started with two machines but not all goes to plan.

I have many separate application pools and we have modified the default pool settings to suit the performance of the machine, although at times we need to go in and modify some of the key ones again from time to time. It’s ongoing I guess, massaging and tweaking to make sure they run.

I don’t run that many standard DNN default builds – the majority of my DNN sites now are in fact precompiled and modified to reduce thousand of what we feel are ‘uneccessary’ hits to the db, particularly when logged in as administrator. I guess from my perspective, the ‘bloat’ has been written out, and there are shared components, less dlls, the builds are released already optimised.

Also – the only host access to these accounts are restricted to a small handful, including my resellers and developers only – who understand and respect this is not a ‘developer machine’. I know EXACTLY what modules are running on the server, and we have a list of modules that I REFUSE to install – I don’t care how high profile they may be, their products are detrimental to the performance of my sites and machines and therefore not allowed.

By running a compiled version the requests to the database are so significantly reduced, so I can put more onto one machine.

Even if I was doing DNN installs, we’d only be putting in the bare minimum. This enormous and ridiculous amount of modules installed make DNN fat and slow in my opinion.

Each ecommerce build has it’s own application pool.
Each site that has alot of traffic or multiple editors, has it’s own application pool.
We do use shared pools, but when we get over 30 sites in there it’s just not happening as I’d like – too many recycles, threshold is met too many times.
We do have timed recycling as well – but that requires a degree of ‘tweaking’ as we’ve found sometimes it’s not been as easy to apply as we would like.

But nothing beats feeding the machine ram.

I hope within the next two months to have remove all the sql2000 instances off the box and we’ll remove sql altogether – however, I do have a couple that won’t upgrade to 2005 and that has eaten alot of my time working out a strategy of – should I upgrade to tell them to move..

Hope this gives you some insight –

Nina Meiers

One question we constantly ask ourselves, is how to organize the ASP.NET Application Pools across our various DNN installs. We have 3 or 4 different "shared" DNN installs that we use to create child/parent portals. We also have a dozen or so clients that have their own separate DNN installs. This is all on the same physical server. What strategy have you adopted for AppPools? Do you create 1 AppPool per DNN install?