Jeff and .NET

I agree - it seems to be failing a lot over the last couple of days..

We're doing some updates to the site very early Thursday morning (US). The same database server runs weblogs, blogs.msdn.com, dotnetnuke.com, www.asp.net, and www.asp.net/forums.

The RSS requests are really hammering the site and it's disk i/o bound. We're moving weblogs to its own raid 0 controller and drive array. Hopefully this problem will be better by tomorrow. We'll be adding a new db server very soon.

Aren't the RSS feeds cached some ridiculous amount?

Seems kind of odd that these would all share the same DB when SQL licenses are free for Microsoft.

FWIW, update on this -- problem solved. Somehow a clustered index was dropped on a table used by the blogs.

The performance on the forums and blogs has gone AWOL ever since they left the ASP.NET fold. What a great advertisement for Microsoft technologies and the .NET community.

> The performance on the forums and blogs has gone AWOL
That is about to be fixed. We've been working with Microsoft on a strategy for us to help run the sites again. That was one of my 'part time' jobs when i was on the Microsoft team. We just ordered another DB too...

Part of the problem has been the unbelievable popularity of the blogs, specifically the msdn blogs. The bandwidth usage alone jumped from about 300GB to 1.3TB in the past 6 months. Considering that www.asp.net, blogs.msdn.com, weblogs.asp.net, www.dotnetnuke.com (and about 5 other sites) all run on 2 web servers and 1 db server I think it held up pretty good :)

One of my sites actually drew more traffic at one time? Huh.

I take it this stuff is well outside of the Microsoft.com fold then, eh? Bandwidth is no longer an issue for me (using ServerMatrix.com). Heck, CPU usage isn't a big deal yet either. It would be a good problem to have in terms of revenue if I did.

It really does seem to be better as of now (10:27 AM ET on Thursday). Certainly the extra database server can't help but be a good thing.