We have a ASP.NET MVC5 website hosted on Azure AppServices.
We have 2 distinct instances of this site on Azure: 1 for tests and 1 for production.
This 2 instances are in distinct Azure plans, but all services considered in each instance is in the same region (Western Europe).
The first one seems to work in an acceptable manner, but we are facing performance issues loading some pages on the 2nd one (sometimes from 15s to +30s page load times).
Each of our application instance is composed of:
ASP.NET MVC 5 (with FormsAuthentication)
N-Tiers Architecture
EntityFramework 6.1.3
ApplicationInsights service
2 SqlServer Databases (1 for business data & 1 for security data) located in a Azure Sql Service
The Azure plan used is "Basic (Small)" for AppServices, and "S0 Standard (10 DTUs)" for SqlServices.
The 1st one is running around 5% for CPU and 58% for Memory. The 2nd one is running around 3% for DTU.
With AppInsights, I've seen that "all is ok in controller" and the problem might comes from below.
I've also detected some page loads having the issue presents a failed Sql dependency call (with result code 207).
The Sql requests respond times are also separately ok (under 300ms).
We have, of course, already read a lot of posts about Azure performance issues but nothing that has helped us.
We would really appreciate some help please.
Many thanks!
Enable the profiler in Application Insights (same thing that used to live under https://azureserviceprofiler.com). It's now under the Performance blade.
Stress test your application for a few hours, enough for a good amount of ETL traces to be collected so it can paint a comprehensive picture of where time is being spent. A tiny "trace" icon will then become available next to your controllers:
Results look like this:
Related
I'm about to start development on a project with very uncertain load/traffic specifics. When it will be released there will certainly be very low load that can easily be handled by a single desktop quad code machine.
The problem is that there will be (after some invite-only period) a strong publicity for the product so I expect considerable traffic/load peaks.
I haven't read enough about cloud providers and I'm mostly leaning toward Amazon or Azure for the credibility these two companies have without checking them out as I should with others (ie. Rackspace that I suppose is also a cloud service provider).
What I want
I would like to create a normal Asp.net MVC web application that can be run on in-house single machine low-cost server. It would run web server along with database (relational and maybe also document) and fulltext search (not SQL FTS but rather high speed separate product like Lucene or Sphinx). But after initial invite-only period I'd like to move this app to the cloud to make it more traffic/load demand-friendly.
As much as I know Amazon offers a sort of virtual machine hosting which I understand you setup as a normal server but has possible flexible resources in terms of load power. I'm not sure if that can be accomplished on Azure as well.
Questions
What is your experience with application transition to cloud and which one did you choose and why?
What would you recommend I should think about when designing/developing the solution to make the transition as painless as possible.
Based on your experience is it better to move to the cloud (financial wise) or is it better to buy your own servers and load balance application yourself and maybe save money on the long run?
"Cloud" is such a vague term. Still, I think this is a very good question.
Basically, IaaS cloud hosting does not magically make your application scale. It's really a virtual private server with very short contract / cancellation periods.
For scalability, the magic lies not so much in the hosting, but in the horizontal scalability of the application code itself. This is related to all the distributed computing challenges. For example, adding more application servers is not always easy: you must be sure that you don't persist any user state in the server application (but rather in a database, static can be evil), caching can be problematic because local caches can make the situation worse if you're using a round-robin strategy, etc.
What is your experience with application transition to cloud and which one did you choose and why?
What would you recommend I should think about when designing/developing the solution to make the transition as painless as possible.
You don't really have to do anything different just to host on EC2 or Azure -- basically. But of course, it's not that easy when things grow.
For instance, EC2 instance storage is rather limited. Additional storage on EBS, however, does not provide comparable performance characteristics and can be a bit more laggy than a disk. The point here is that EBS does magically scale, and it's probably more PaaS than IaaS; but it's not a simple hard disk and it does, consequently, not behave like a hard drive. I don't know about Azure block storage. In general, expect additional abstraction layers to introduce problems of their own, no matter what they do.
Based on your experience is it better to move to the cloud (financial wise) or is it better to buy your own servers and load balance application yourself and maybe save money on the long run?
Typical cloud providers are more expensive than the usual 'round-the-corner VPS providers, but they are, to my experience, also much more reliable and professional. EC2 has a free tier (but it's quite small), Azure gives you a small instance for free for 3 months.
Doing the calculation right is rather tricky; for example, if you have to shut down your service for whatever reason, it's nice to be able to cancel now rather than pay another year - you might want to put this risk into your calculation. On the other hand, both EC2 and Azure will be considerably cheaper if you sign up for 6 or 12 months, rather than paying by the hour.
You might want to check out the free Azure plan, because it's nice to start fiddling around without any cost. A big advantage of cloud providers is that you can scale vertically very easily: buying a 16 core, 64GB RAM server machine is really expensive, but if there's so much traffic on your site, upgrading your plan won't be such a big issue.
As someone hasn't mention it yet...
AppHarbor has been amazing. You can push stuff in a matter of minutes. Deployment is a breeze. And setting up your project for it is easier as well. And it doesn't even require any major changes in your solution to fit in.
For the full-text search, you might consider something like Websolr.
A lot of this depends on what your app is doing (e.g., are there separable components that might benefit from running on different instances, vs. a simple CRUD application with a front end). One thing to consider is that in a cloud application you normally don't have a traditional relational database. As such, you have to choose either cloud or traditional hosting, or plan on coding your access layer twice. Azure does have relational databases (SQL Azure), although they're not identical to SQL Server 2008R2. You're going to have to research the pros/cons of a cloud setup for your specific situation.
As far as financial concerns, it's usually a lot cheaper to just get an account with a hosting company instead of a cloud service, since you pay by the month, instead of the hour (last time I checked an account with Azure running 24/7 for a month would cost about $40-$50, while you can get hosting for $15 a month). The savings with the cloud come in when you have to run several servers, and the cost of maintaining them surpasses the cost of the instance on the cloud platform.
So, sorry, there's no silver bullet answer for you. Read up on the different services available. Consider what your application needs, what prices will be, and go from there.
I have just migrated an MVC-based application from a dedicated server to Azure. When migrating the MSSQl-database, I first tried importing .bacpak files but some of the tables failed because of their size. I then used the SQL Database migratio wizard which worked fine for small tables but failed for tables with BLOB-fields. For these tables I had to use temporary intermediate tables. Then after a while after all the data was transferred setting up the Webapp was a breeze and we went in production. At first, everything seemed to work just fine, but after a couple of hours when the load got heavier, all kind of errors occurred. I went into the Azure portal and it was really easy to see the
Currently after a build/deployment of our app (58 projects, large asp.net MVC 3 front end) takes ~15-20secs to load as it goes through the whole 'recycling the app pool' (release configuration).
We do have a web farm if that alters people's answers, but the question really is:
What are people doing in large scale applications where a maintenance window isn't viable (we're a 24/7 very active website) to minimize that initial 'first hit' on the app pool recycle after a deploy?
We've used a number of tools to analyze that startup time and there doesn't really seem to be any way to bring it down so what I'm looking for are what techniques do people employ in order to minimize the impact of a large application deploy affecting users.
By default - if you change 15 files in an ASP.NET application at once (even via FTP) then the app pool is automatically recycled. You can change the number of files but as soon as web.config and bin files are changed then it needs to recycle. So in my opinion the ideal solution for an environment like yours would be as follows:
4 web servers (this is an arbitrary number)
each server has a status.aspx that the load balancer looks at - use TeamCity to take 2 of these servers "off line" (off the load balancer) and wait 20 seconds for the traffic to filter across. A distributed cache will help keep user experience problems
Use TeamCity to deploy to those 2 servers - run your automated tests etc. and once you are happy put those back into the farm and take the other 2 offline and deploy to those
This can all be scripted / automated. The only issue with this is any schema changes that are not backwards compatible may not allow running the new version site in parallel with old version of the site for the 20 seconds for the load balancer to kick back in
This is good old fashioned Canary Releasing - there are some patterns here http://continuousdelivery.com/patterns/ to help take into consideration. Id also suggest a copy of that continuous delivery book - its like a continuous delivery bible and has got me out of a few situations :)
At the very base you could run a tinyget script against the application after completion of deployment which will "warm up" the application however if a customer hits your site before the script can run, they will still face a delay. What do you currently have in place, what post deployment steps do you have in place?
In a farm environment you could stage deployments too, so take one server out of load balance, update it and then bring that online after deployment and take the other out, complete the deployment and then reintroduce into the farm. How is your SQL Server setup - clustered?
copy and paste from my post here
We operate a Blue/Green deployment strategy on a 4 tier architecture which has a web site over 4 servers at the top tier. Due to the complexity the architecture introduced for deployments, we needed a way to deploy without disturbing any traffic to the "live" site. Following Fowler's advice, but not quite in the same way, we came up with a solution that means we have 2 sites on each server (a blue and a green, or in our case site A and site B). The live site has the appropriate host header, and once we have deployed and tested to the non-live site, we then flip the headers of the 2 sites so that what was once live is now the non-live site, and vice-versa. The effect is, a robust deployment that can be done in business hours and with the highest level of confidence.
This of course complicates your configuration and deployment slightly, but it's worth the effort. I guess it kind of goes without saying that you want to script both the deployment, and the host header swapping.
Firstly, unless you're running Google or something bigger, does a 15-20s load time at 3am for a handful of users really impact that much? I'd say the effort invested in eliminating the occasional lag would far outweigh the 15-20s inconvenience of a couple of users.
I consider it a necessary evil of using ASP.NET unfortunately. Using a pre-compiled site (.DLLs instead of the code-behind files) will lessen the time but not necessarily eliminate it.
The best thing you can do is use something like a status notification bar to warn users they may experience some "issues" during "essential maintenance".
But even then, I'd say in terms of user experience it'd be better to keep quiet and have a handful of people blame their "slow internet" when your site takes 20s to load on one occasion, than announce to all and sundry that it will be slow.
You can also try this approach : http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/09/15/auto-start-asp-net-applications-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx
without knowing anything about your site, my first thought is that you might be able to break it down into smaller sites so that they start faster individually.
second, with your web farm, i assume you have some sort of load balancing device in front of that from which you can pull machines out of the pool when they are being deployed. don't put them back in the pool until after you have sent a request against the site to get it started up. you should be able to script this such that you are pretty much clicking a button that takes a machine out, deploys to it, and sends a request after it's back up and happy.
You can consider using aspnet_compiler.exe to precompile your application, because I think the delay after deployment is caused by the compilation phase rather than "whole recycling the app pool".
We have a MVC 3 application which has been deployed onto a newly built Windows 2008 R2 Web Edition server which is performing badly.
This application has been through development, quality assurance and user acceptance testing cycles on the same operating system (different boxes) with no performance issues.
The only difference we can see with the server is that it sits in the DMZ and as such has two network adapters configured, one for the internet, and one to punch through the firewall.
We have put all sorts of logging into the application and confirmed that up until the 'return ActionResult' everything is working correctly (ie ~500ms). It then takes 15 seconds to render the page.
We have tried turning on debug=false in the config file, i'm not sure what else to look for here, it seems like an environment issue.
Any suggestions please ? I am about to investigate if the thread pool size could be causing problems.
Also, if it helps the page is using multiple partial views, i have read others having problems with them.
Thanks,
Matt
Since the application performs ok in other environments I would suggest you investigate following:
Database - are you running against different database? How long the queries execute? If you have non-optimized database with million records on production, and only few records in test you want find performance problems soon enough.
Network - what is the latency between web box and database? If you loose 100ms for each database query just because of network than if your page triggers 50 queries you've lost 5secs. I've seen poorly configured routers / load balancers that were doing just that.
Try profiling each component of your system (db, network, web box) in order to find out where you're wasting all that time. Try http://code.google.com/p/mvc-mini-profiler/.
PS. You MUST have debug=false in your prod env.
I have an asp mvc app hosted at www.jacquelinewhite.co.uk. When I use firebug (net tab or page speed) I'm seeing response times of 200 milliseconds for an action that isn't cached and about 30 for a cached action result. However, my reports from pingdom.com are showing an average of between 3 and 7 seconds for a response.
The application is set not to recycle and sits at a consistent memory level. I can't see any CPU spikes and basically everything looks fine, except the response times are a lot slower than I'd hope for.
I'm inclined to think it's not a problem with pingdom and the google webmaster tools shows the sites as slower than 54% of other sites.
Where else might I look at to identify the sites slowness?
Well, as luck would have it, the Stackoverflow team has just released an MVC Profiler (which was originally developed to profile this family of sites). The profiler is available from code.google.com/p/mvc-mini-profiler and also as a NuGet package. You should be able to use it to profile your site and perhaps spot any bottle-necks.
Another useful profiling-type tool is called Glimpse:
"At its core Glimpse allows you to
debug your web site or web service
right in the browser. Glimpse allows
you to "Glimpse" into what's going on
in your web server. In other words
what Firebug is to debugging your
client side code, Glimpse is to
debugging your server within the
client."
I run a social community site for card players. I currently have 7,000+ members and getting 2,000 visitors/15k+ pageviews a day. Recently the site has started to really slow down during peak hours of the day and I am starting to think my site needs some serious performance optimizations in the code and settings. I really don't want to purchase a second server to run the site as I am pretty sure my current server should be able to handle this kind of load easily.
During peak hours, when the pages load, they still load very quickly. The problem is that a lot of times it will timeout and give a "website not available" error in the browser. Then you refresh it and it loads up quickly. Then a couple of pageviews later it will do it again. My CPU and RAM usage do not even get very high during these times, so I must believe it is in my IIS settings or something. I have done some searching and cannot find any good answers or ideas of what a fix could be.
Here are some stats of my setup:
ASP.NET MVC 2 w/ Output Caching and Partial View caching
IIS 7
Windows Web Server 2008 RC2 64-Bit
AMD Athlon II X2
4GB of RAM
My heavier pages on the site have quite a bit of database reads and a lot of image requests. I am not sure if this is the problem, because when a page does load it is VERY fast.
I did purchase a new server I am building and was thinking about switching everything to this instead. The new server I just got is gonna run an Intel Xeon X3430 2.4GHz Quad-Core w/ HT and 8GB RAM.
I am looking for a few possible things I could look into for this problem and if there are any possible solutions or settings I could implement to stop the "website not available" messages and also help my server handle future traffic increases as the site grows. Would upgrading the server to this new one make the difference?
It looks like this is more of an IIS issue than your code or hardware. There is a default setting for max concurrent connections per cpu and queue length that you may be reaching.
See Optimising IIS Performance and someone with a similar problem (and resolution).