Servers vs. Worker Processes

Question

Just wanted to get some other opinions. I am currently having a discussion on how to go on a web environment. We want to virtualize our web layer for a very active site. However, there is a debate going on as to which is better. More servers or more worker processes on the site. Here are the two opinions.

I want to turn our 6 physical servers into 6 virtual hosts. Run 10 VMs per host with 8 GB of RAM, 4 proc cores, and 2 worker processes on 1 application pool.

My coworker wants to run 2 VMs per host with 32 GB of RAM, 4 proc cores, and 10 worker processes on 1 application pool.

My thought has always been run fewer worker processes and more servers to increase performance because worker processes (in my experience) are not incredibly reliable.

Any thoughts would be great. Thank you.

Benchmark it. there's no way to know without benchmarking. – Michael Martinez Apr 14 '14 at 20:12 — Michael Martinez, Apr 14 '14 at 20:12

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

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Sorry to say, I think the only appropriate answer is "It depends" - and once you start digging into what "it depends" on, you'll find that you have to benchmark your current site, with good metrics. Then build each scenario you want to test, with a synthetic load that is as close to a busy day on your production site, and monitor the same metrics. Both from the server side, and from the client side (delay during transactions, load times, etc).

How do you do load testing and capacity planning for web sites?

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

Community

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answered Apr 14 '14 at 19:33

mfinni

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Yeah I have run a few load tests but haven't gotten everything I want. We have several tools that do monitor this but, of course, the only way to truly test this is to do it. Thanks for the feedback. – Matt Apr 15 '14 at 13:18

Servers vs. Worker Processes

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