More on Recycling in COM+

As I have been load testing this COM+ application, I have setup several pools of this application in COM+.  Once I setup multiple pools of the application, I can watch the multiple instances of DLLHost startup and go away in the taskmanager, just like they are suppossed to do.  I am hoping that this will resolve our problems.

While I do NOT like COM+, and I state once again, that COM+ should NOT be used unless you know why you need it, it is nice to see that these features work as advertised.  Let me say this once again incase you missed it the first time: "If you DO NOT know why you need COM+, don't use it!  If you know what COM+ is and why your application should use it, then yes, you should use it, but using COM+ for the sake of using COM+ (or you read about its cool features in some article) is not a good enough reason to use it."  I do not care that someone once sold you on COM+ solving all your problems and being the best snake oil ever.  COM+ is a complicated set of technologies that come with a price to be paid for using them.  If you need distributed transactions, then COM+ is a good thing to use.  If you are going against a single data source, then COM+ is most likely not a good thing to use and will result in an application that will not scale and is harder to maintain then you realize. 

What about object pooling?  Most database software (Oracle, Sql Server, and such) support some type of pooling of connections, so the ability to pool objects in COM+ is a more complicated discussion than it appears on the surface.  If you have to start up additional objects that take a long time to start, then maybe object pooling can help, but I think that the case for this is pretty slim, not zero, just slim.

There are other services provided, but distributed transactions and object pooling are the two that people talk about the most with regards to COM+, if they ever talk about the services.  I find that most folks get this "Cool, a new tool to play with" look when they talk about COM+.