Capacity Planning
Capacity Planning |
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Because the Internet Start page at http://home.microsoft.com is the default home page for the Internet Explorer browser, the hit rate at the site is continually increasing. At the time of this writing, each of the servers was handling between 2,000 and 4,000 viewers per second. In May of 1997, as access to http://home.microsoft.com became increasingly difficult, a task force was formed and given the charter to find a solution. The group met daily for six weeks, working to return the site to nominal performance.
The first step was to examine the hardware, beginning with the servers—Internet connection bandwidth was not saturated, and therefore could not be the central issue. With the number of viewers increasing rapidly, the servers were adding viewer requests to the queue faster than they were delivering responses. More servers were added to handle the load, but this alone was not sufficient. The task force began probing the connections among servers, databases, and viewers to find and eliminate possible signal breakdowns or bottlenecks. They also initiated a process of streamlining the site’s HTML and ASP code to make it as lean and efficient as possible. By mid-June some progress had been made, but it was clear that something else was wrong.