How much is too much...or too little

Capacity planning is the process of planning for growth and forecasting peak usage periods in order to meet system and application capacity requirements.

Planning the resources for a large site and keeping it up is quite a job. Check these stats of www.asp.net and CodeProject to know what's involved.

www.asp.net

General statistics
Over 4,000 files
23% ASP.NET Page files (.aspx)
46% Code-behind / BLL / DAL
31% Resource files: images, etc.

Server cluster hosts many applications
www.asp.net (plus online starter kits)
weblogs.asp.net / blogs.msdn.com
forums.asp.net / www.dotnetnuke.com


May 2003
~485GB bandwidth usage
2mm Unique visitors
42K downloads of .NET Framework
23K Forum Posts

May 2004
~1.5TB bandwidth usage
2.9mm Unique visitors
62K downloads of .NET Framework
28K Forum Posts


Original Hardware Specs.
2 Web Servers
Windows Server 2000
Dual-750 MHZ Processors
500 MB RAM
1 Database Server
Windows Server 2000
Single 750 MHZ Processor
1 GB RAM

Replaced Web Servers
Upgraded to Windows Server 2003
2 dual-processor 2.2 GHZ + 1 GB RAM

Single Database Server
Windows Server 2000
2 dual-processor 2.8 GHZ (Hyper-threaded)
2 GB Memory

Source: Case study of running the www.asp.net/forums/ by Rob Howard

CodeProject Stats April 2004

Number of CodeProject members 1,090,000
Number of unique developers visiting each month 1.1 million
Number of user sessions each month 3.7 million
Number of pages served each month 28 million
Number of opt-in email subscribers 1 million

"The Code Project is hosted on six web servers:
2 dual-proc PIII 866mhz boxes with 1Gb of RAM, and 90GB of mirrored HD space, two P4 1.8Ghz single-proc boxes with 1Gb RAM, and 2 P4 2.53Ghz single-proc boxes with 1Gb RAM.
Each runs Windows 2000 Advanced Server and .NET 1.1. These boxes access a dedicated File/Mail server (dual PIII 800's) and 3 similar spec'd database servers running SQL Server 2000. All 10 machines have Dual 100mb/s networks cards. They are beige, they occasionally chew up and spit out hard drives, and they pine when left alone too long"

Microsoft India Case Studies and this, much larger collection of case-studies of business solutions built on Microsoft technologies offer food for thought...and planning.