Our company have 3 virtual machines allocated for software developers to deploy internal web services. The servers are setup as a server farm behind a net scalar load balancer. Each server has 12GB of RAM and have Xeon ES-2650 processors at 2.2Ghz.
Each server currently about 90 web services running in IIS. Each web services is some version of .NET ranging from .NET Framework 4 to .NET 6. Over time, the plan is to add many more services, probably in excess of 200.
Currently, the developers are saying the servers do not have enough RAM, which appears to be true as the RAM percentage is over 90%, however every time we add more RAM, it is consumed almost immediately. They have mentioned that the services should be allowed at least 100MB or RAM each, meaning we would have to allocate 9GB (later 20GB) just for applications. I am beginning to wonder the following questions. T
- Is something wrong with their applications that is causing the memory to be consumed immediately?
- Is 90, or later 200+ services, too many to be running on a single server
- Is 100MB RAM an accurate estimate for a service?
- Should we be scaling up, with bigger servers, or scaling out, with more servers in the farm?