Visual Studio has its own integrated ASP.NET engine which is
used to run the ASP.NET Web application from Visual Studio. ASP.NET Development
Server is responsible for executing all the requests and responses from the
client. Now after the end of development, when you want to host the site on
some server to allow other people to access, concept of web servers comes in
between. A web server is responsible for providing the response for all the
requests that are coming from clients. The below diagram shows the typical
deployment structure of an ASP.NET Web application with a single IIS.
Clients request for resources and IIS process the request
and send back to clients. If you want to know more details on How IIS Processes
the request, please read one of my articles about “How IIS Process ASP.NET
Request?”.
Web Farm
This is the case where
you have only one web server and multiple clients requesting for resources from the same server. But when
are is huge amount of incoming traffic for your web sites, one standalone server is not sufficient
to process the request. You may need to use multiple servers to host the application and
divide the traffic among them. This is called “Web Farm”. So when you are
hosting your single web site on
multiple web servers over load balancer is called “Web Farm”. The below diagram shows the overall
representation of Web Farms.
In
general web farm architecture, a single application is hosted on multiple IIS
Server and those are connected
with the VIP (Virtual IP) with Load Balancer. Load Balancer IPs are exposed to
external world to
access. So whenever some request will come to server from clients, it will
first hit the Load Balancer, then
based on the traffic on each server, LB distributes the request to the
corresponding web server. These
web servers may share the same DB server or maybe they can use a replicated
server in the backend.
So, in a single statement, when we host a web application over multiple web
servers to distribute the load
among them, it is called Web Farm.
Now, by default, each and every Application pool contains a single worker
process. Application which contains the multiple
worker process is called “Web Garden”. Below
is the typical diagram for a web garden application.
In the above diagram, you can see one of the applications containing the multiple worker processes, which is now a web garden.So, a Web application hosted on multiple servers and access based on the load on servers is called Web Farms and when a single application pool contains multiple Worker processes, it is called a web garden.
Web Garden
Now, let’s have a look at
what is Web Garden? Both the terms sound the same, but they are totally different from each
other. Before starting with Web Garden, I hope you have a fundamental idea of
what an Application Pool
is and what a Worker Process is. If you have already read the article, “How IIS Processes ASP.NET Request
?”, then I can expect that you now have a good idea about both of them. Just to recall, when we
are talking about requesting processing within IIS, Worker Process (w3wp.exe) takes care of all of
these. Worker Process runs the ASP.NET application in IIS. All the ASP.NET
functionality inside IIS runs
under the scope of worker process. Worker Process is responsible for handling
all kinds of request, response,
session data, cache data. Application Pool is the container of worker process.Application poolis
used to separate sets of IIS worker processes and enables a better security,
reliability, and
availability for any web application.
Create Web Garden in IIS 6 and IIS 7
Now, I am going to show how you can change the Number
of Worker processes in both IIS 6 and IIS 7. For IIS 6, Right Click on
Application Pool > Properties > Goto Performance Tab.
In the “Performance Tab” section, you would have one option called “Web Garden” where worker process sets to “1”, you can set the number of worker processes that you required.
For IIS 7, Right Click on Application Pool > Go To Advance Settings > In Process Model section, you will have “Maximum Worker Processes”. You can change it more than 1 to make it as a web garden.
In the above image, you can also check the definition of Web Garden.
Advantages of Web Farm and Web Garden
Now, let’s have a look into the advantages of both the Web Farms and Web Gardens.
Advantages of Web Farm
- It provides high availability. If any of the servers in the farm goes down, Load balancer can redirect the requests to other servers.
- Provides high performance response for client requests.
- Provides better scalability of the web application and reduces the failure of the application.
- Session and other resources can be stored in a centralized location to access by all the servers.
Advantages of Web Garden
- Provides better application availability by sharing requests between multiple worker process.
- Web garden uses processor affinity where application can be swapped out based on preference and tag setting.
- Less consumption of physical space for web garden configuration.
How to Manage Session in Web Farm Mode?
While using session, requests are distributed among different servers. By default, session mode is set to In Proc where session data is stored inside worker process memory. But, in Web farm mode, we can share the session among all the servers using a single session store location by making it Out proc (State Server or SQL Server Mode). So, if some of the servers go down and request is transferred to the other server by the Load balancer, session data should be available for that request.
In the above diagram, you can see that we can both the IIS server sharing the same session data which is stored in out of worker process. You can read one of my previous articles “Exploring Session in ASP.NET” where I have explained how you can configure session mode for Out Process mode.
While using Web garden with your application, you need make a couple of configuration settings in web.config in
<process Model> section where you need to set certain properties like cpuMask, RequestLimit, webGarden,ClientConnectCheck, etc.Summary
When we host a web application over multiple web servers to distribute the load among them, it is called Web Farm and when one application has multiple worker processes, it is called a Web garden.
In this blog post, I have explained the very basics of what a Web Farm is and what a Web Garden is. As this blog post contains the basic information to understand the fundamentals of web farms and web garden concept, I will be posting a separate article with details configuration setting for web garden and web farm. You can read the following articles for more information:
