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We have a site example.com and we have a large server 48 GB of RAM. Is it better to have one giant site using all the 48 GB or say eight copies of the same site each with its own App pool own bindings its own port etc.

Which is a better utilization of the server and or better availability

Dave M
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Tony
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  • We usually don't talk about high availability when there is a single machine. You might want to read https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/extensions/configuring-application-request-routing-arr/achieving-high-availability-and-scalability-arr-and-nlb – Lex Li Sep 25 '22 at 16:26
  • We are going to have 4 servers. Question is how to use ram – Tony Sep 25 '22 at 23:27
  • It might go against intuition but a web app on IIS should consume as little memory (less than 1.5-GB) as possible (so as to be responsive), so if your goal was to force it to consume all available memory, you misunderstood the key concepts and was on the wrong direction. – Lex Li Sep 26 '22 at 03:46
  • Please edit your question to describe the size of the sites in question. There is a big difference between a hundred requests per day, and a hundred million. And any other sizing details that lead you to think this size of server was appropriate. It might be, but you probably want to split into many instances. – John Mahowald Sep 28 '22 at 02:46

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Try a few designs with various combinations of which app pools and which sites on which servers. And determine a safe capacity level for your performance objectives. There is not one correct answer when doing capacity planning.

A few years ago this very Stack Overflow network covered their architecture and noted that the entire network of Q&A sites can run off of one application on one server. In reality, just the web app tier runs on like 9 servers because hardware is inexpensive, enabling performance and high availability as features. Stack Exchange is probably an outlier by a few metrics, but its definitely simple to dedicate a few hosts to varies services in the architecture, and not worry too much about RAM and CPU.

Also consider whether you want to split up the resources into many virtual machines or containers. Allowing operating system maintenance to affect less of the total capacity at once. Possibly getting better resource utilization. At the price of having more operating system instances and a hypervisor layer to manage.

John Mahowald
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  • basically when I’m wondering is a IIS use 48 ckres in 192 gigs of ram effectively for a single site or is it more effective that to use multiple sites because it’s not really designed to work with that much memory and ram. – Tony Sep 26 '22 at 01:32