SQL Server Express 2008/IIS7 Optimizations?
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URL: https://forums.webwiz.net/forum_posts.asp?TID=29143
Printed Date: 01 April 2026 at 7:26am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.08 - https://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: SQL Server Express 2008/IIS7 Optimizations?
Posted By: stevehal
Subject: SQL Server Express 2008/IIS7 Optimizations?
Date Posted: 20 February 2011 at 2:17pm
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Hi,
We have a pretty powerful quad core server running with about 5 forum sites, with a few forums having 100,000 posts, 30,000 topics, etc. But generally users are about 10 at a time.
In many cases, pages load VERY quick. Like the main page could read:
This page was generated in 0.031 seconds.
But in other cases, loading a page can take forever! Like after editing a post, I pressed the forum home link, and it read:
This page was generated in 9.951 seconds.
The server uses SQL Server 2008 Express.
Are there any IIS7 or SQL Server 2008 Express optimizations recommended to prevent this? We have had a few forum users starting to complain a little and I am concerned. The server was specifically setup to be for the forums. Is 2GB memory enough? It is running Windows Server 2008 Web Edition. And in most cases, the database is showing about 150MB of memory used, and each forum is showing about 120 to 300 mb of memory used. The server itself is up to 85 percent memory used.
Could be be because of the 85 percent of memory used? And some is getting written to a swap disk? I could add more memory to the server.... I just wanted to see if anyone has had experience with server speeds, configurations, and memory.
Thanks,
Steve
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Replies:
Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 21 February 2011 at 9:54am
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Allot of the times slow load times are due to modifications made to the original code base. Could you provide a link to your forum as this will give a better idea as to what maybe the issue? ------------- https://www.webwiz.net/web-wiz-forums/forum-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - Web Wiz Forums Hosting https://www.webwiz.net/web-hosting/windows-web-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - ASP.NET Web Hosting |
Posted By: stevehal
Date Posted: 21 February 2011 at 4:14pm
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Hi Bruce, Check out http://www.simforums.com/forums" rel="nofollow - http://www.simforums.com/forums
See this post: http://www.simforums.com/forums/sloooooow-forum-performance-esp-when-posting_topic38330.html" rel="nofollow - http://www.simforums.com/forums/sloooooow-forum-performance-esp-when-posting_topic38330.html
There are really no mods to this forum except a minor mod to the image upload popup window.
Thanks for checking it!
In addition: I just saw w3wp.exe over 400mb on the site and SQLServer at 500MB. I reset the computer and w3wp.exe (one of 5 or 6 on the server) went back down to 122mb and was growing steadily until it reached 400MB. But things are now faster after a server restart.
Now, before the server restart, SQLServer was down to about 150, and the w3wp.exe entries were all more reasonable, between 80 and 300. Memory usage is up to 1.9GB of 2.0GB now.
A question:
Is it normal for ASP sites with database connections to reach 400MB of memory usage? I do not mind having to add more memory... And I understand you cannot give an exact answer to any server/site issues. But if I know what is normal for an SQL version of the forum, that will help me to look into server issues. I doubt there is something wrong with the forums, as this is just happened recently as the forums have gotten more busy.
Thanks,
Steve
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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 22 February 2011 at 12:46pm
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SQL Server likes as much memory as you can throw at it as it is a real memory hog. To have the SQL Server only using 150MB for a forum database with almost 200,000 posts and probably also providing services for other websites and databases is VERY low and you must be throttling it down. For a server to be running Windows 2008 with SQL Server the server needs to have at least 2Gb of memory if not more. In your case with 1.9GB being used you need more as SQL Server needs allot more than it currently can use. You should remove any memory throttling you have on your SQL Server, or set it to something more reasonable like 1GB or more dpending on the number of databases and their sizes. This should speed things up for you. With a forum with 200 active users the application pool for the forum (w3wp.exe) should use around 200MB of memory in 32-it mode with the latest 9.70 release. For best performance Web Wiz Forums should run in it's own Application Pool configured to run as a 32bit process by editing the application pool and setting 'Enable 32-bit applications' to True. This gives best memory and performance on Windows 2008 x64.
------------- https://www.webwiz.net/web-wiz-forums/forum-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - Web Wiz Forums Hosting https://www.webwiz.net/web-hosting/windows-web-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - ASP.NET Web Hosting |
Posted By: stevehal
Date Posted: 22 February 2011 at 1:52pm
Thanks Bruce. Just the info I needed! In many cases, the forums are lightning fast, and I just need to do a few tweaks to keep it that way. I do think it is related to the amount of memory being used in SQL Server. That does seem low, and as w3wp.exe memory rises, Server 2008 must drop back on SQL Server out of priority I guess, and thus you can breeze through many pages, then all the sudden you get a 9 second page (it is obviously database reading that is the issue as the script would not take that long). I do think that the server setup is not typical, and I need to add more memory. Also, pruning the database from posts going back to 2003 would not be a bad idea either.
Thanks,
Steve
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Posted By: stevehal
Date Posted: 23 February 2011 at 5:14pm
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2GB of RAM were added (there are 4GB total now), and things have significantly improved, and the SQL Server is now using 1.5GB of RAM, with it set to 2GB as the max setting in the SQL Server Manager (that is what appears there by default). So, adding the 2GB RAM now has allowed SQL Server to load 1GB more into memory. I guess that is a good thing, especially if we have forums with 200,000 posts in it. So all is fine!
Thanks,
Steve
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Posted By: yandr
Date Posted: 29 June 2011 at 8:00pm
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I am having similar problems with my forum, approaching 200 thousand posts too. The performance tab shows: Read (B/min) 382,275,341 Is that normal? |
Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 30 June 2011 at 9:27am
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There is no such thing as normal in this sense as every forum is unique as there are so many things that can affect performance, including hardware, network and even if your members post long posts or quick one line posts. We have database servers here with over 500 databases and several million forums posts that show on average 2,500,000 B/sec, but these servers are running Solid State Disks and a minimum of 10GB RAM. ------------- https://www.webwiz.net/web-wiz-forums/forum-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - Web Wiz Forums Hosting https://www.webwiz.net/web-hosting/windows-web-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - ASP.NET Web Hosting |
Posted By: yandr
Date Posted: 30 June 2011 at 9:34pm
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Thank you for the answer. I guess the real question is whether a shared hosting plan would accept this kind of resource usage or not. Would you?
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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 01 July 2011 at 8:08am
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That would be difficult to know as saying your performance tab shows Read (B/min) 382,275,341 means absolutely nothing as there are lots of things that affect disk IO, from paging to defragmenting the disk system. I can tell you though that we do host many 100's of forums that have over 200,000 posts on our shared hosting. Some of the larger forums that we host are up around the million post mark. ------------- https://www.webwiz.net/web-wiz-forums/forum-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - Web Wiz Forums Hosting https://www.webwiz.net/web-hosting/windows-web-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - ASP.NET Web Hosting |