IIS Server and Windows File System soft links

Question

I have 1500+ websites running under a single instance of IIS Server version 7.5 (Windows 2008 R2 Server OS). Each website is running under its own app pool. Each website has an MVC application that is approximately 47 MB in size. I am planning on using Windows File System soft links (mklink) to point the MVC bin folder to a common area on the filesystem. Hence, I would have 1500+ MVC apps pointing to a base install area.

I have tested with one website and everything works as expected. My concern is that I don't know how well this idea will scale. Has anyone done something similar? Thx.

Answer 1

I have used a similar setup with 100+ sites and haven't seen any issues.

In IIS each application caches a copy of the binaries in a temp folder at start/compile time, so I see no reason why this would not scale. You would obviously want to be careful about starting all the sites at the same time as disk IO would be prohibitive, but that's an issue no matter where the binaries are.

Obviously this would not be a good setup for production sites as the sheer memory required would be prohibitive, but for a dev/testing environment it should work just fine..