How to increase the performance on my ASP.NET MVC 2 website?

Question

I run a social community site for card players. I currently have 7,000+ members and getting 2,000 visitors/15k+ pageviews a day. Recently the site has started to really slow down during peak hours of the day and I am starting to think my site needs some serious performance optimizations in the code and settings. I really don't want to purchase a second server to run the site as I am pretty sure my current server should be able to handle this kind of load easily.

During peak hours, when the pages load, they still load very quickly. The problem is that a lot of times it will timeout and give a "website not available" error in the browser. Then you refresh it and it loads up quickly. Then a couple of pageviews later it will do it again. My CPU and RAM usage do not even get very high during these times, so I must believe it is in my IIS settings or something. I have done some searching and cannot find any good answers or ideas of what a fix could be.

Here are some stats of my setup:

• ASP.NET MVC 2 w/ Output Caching and Partial View caching
• IIS 7
• Windows Web Server 2008 RC2 64-Bit
• AMD Athlon II X2
• 4GB of RAM

My heavier pages on the site have quite a bit of database reads and a lot of image requests. I am not sure if this is the problem, because when a page does load it is VERY fast.

I did purchase a new server I am building and was thinking about switching everything to this instead. The new server I just got is gonna run an Intel Xeon X3430 2.4GHz Quad-Core w/ HT and 8GB RAM.

I am looking for a few possible things I could look into for this problem and if there are any possible solutions or settings I could implement to stop the "website not available" messages and also help my server handle future traffic increases as the site grows. Would upgrading the server to this new one make the difference?

Answer 1

It looks like this is more of an IIS issue than your code or hardware. There is a default setting for max concurrent connections per cpu and queue length that you may be reaching.

See Optimising IIS Performance and someone with a similar problem (and resolution).