Application Pools and perfomance

[flyby]

Plesk 7
I had seen that plesk setup one pool for every domain.
Microsoft said to me that is not a good idea, becores of all the recores used by the pools.
And performance is slow do to the Application Pool that has to start every time.
I talk whit some people that say that 2-3 pool is a good setup.

As far as i know plesk 6.5 only set up one pool for all domains.


Dos anyone see the same problem here?

 

[jaytee]

Well, it depends on who do you ask in Microsoft. With some caveats, you can have thousands of pools. Only active pools consume the resources. Also, application pools provide security in shared hosting environment.

How many domains do you host, and how many of them are hosting dynamic content? There are a number of optimization settings helping to reduce resource usage in high-load scenario. First, reduce the Idle Timeout for app pools from 20 minutes to may be 2-3 minutes. Second, look up and configure UseSharedWPDesktop setting - otherwise IIS6 will be limited to ~60 simultaneously active app pools. Don't mix ASP and ASP.NET.

So on...

 

[flyby]

Hey jaytee. thanks for anwser my faq

I understand that pools provide security, but it uses from about 4 mb to 20 mb ram, and i had some problems whit a user where the pool restart becores he use over 150 mb disk space.

Why did Plesk change the the design of pool from 1 (plesk 6.5) to 1 for everyone (plesk 7)?

And what is the problem whit running asp and asp.net?
If its a problem, why is it posible to add both on the same time in hosting setup?

 

[jaytee]

In Plesk 6.5 IIS6 was originally working in IIS5 compatibility mode, that's why it had only one pool. The problem with one (or 2-3) pools is that when one user's app crashes, a lot of other users are also affected.

As to pool restart because of disk space usage - I'm not sure I understand the issue. Application pool is the process, it does not use disk space per se. Are you talking about memory usage?

Running ASP and ASP.NET together is not recommended by Microsoft. In-depth explanation is too long, but the root issue is virtual memory fragmentation. Again, it is much harder to avoid running them together if you place a lot of customers into one pool.

 

[mhelms]

First of all, as far as I know, app pool's _was_ made for the hosting business.

Seccondly app pools consume memory which is why the pool's are limited to 60, and why MS reccomend 2-3 pool's.

It is correct that a "pool" of customers can be shutdown due to inapropiate behavior on 1 customer account, but that's exactly why that particular customer and all the other customers in that pool belong to the "unsafe pool".

 

[tommyeriksen]

Originally posted by jaytee
Running ASP and ASP.NET together is not recommended by Microsoft. In-depth explanation is too long, but the root issue is virtual memory fragmentation. Again, it is much harder to avoid running them together if you place a lot of customers into one pool.

As flyby wrote, why are both checkboxes available while setting up hosting then? (If it is discouraged using both).
A small warning that you are now going against best practices would be nice (I honestly didn't know that and happily throw both ASP and .NET at customers).

Btw,

Originally posted by jaytee
Second, look up and configure UseSharedWPDesktop setting - otherwise IIS6 will be limited to ~60 simultaneously active app pools.

I haven't read any detailed docs about this yet, but I wonder why it isn't just set up properly by the Plesk-installer? Or runtime by Plesk itself?
I mean, when I buy a control panel, I buy it to avoid having to dive into advanced administration issues myself.

Thanks in advance
Tommy

 

[jaytee]

Originally posted by tommyeriksen
As flyby wrote, why are both checkboxes available while setting up hosting then? (If it is discouraged using both).
A small warning that you are now going against best practices would be nice (I honestly didn't know that and happily throw both ASP and .NET at customers).

We have learned about this fairly recently ourselves. It is not widely published as far as I know - basically, it is a bug in .Net. We will add this warning in future versions, but you see, a lot of people just enable everything because they don't know what they will use eventually. I don't think that a lot of people _really_ use both simultaneously yet, so the scope of the problem is limited.

I haven't read any detailed docs about this yet, but I wonder why it isn't just set up properly by the Plesk-installer? Or runtime by Plesk itself?
I mean, when I buy a control panel, I buy it to avoid having to dive into advanced administration issues myself.

FIrst, you really need to do this only if you experience specific problems. 60 simultaneously running app pools is actually not a small number in any case. We have happy customers with numbers close to a thousand of sites per box who never had to change anything in IIS config. Second, it does reduce security, albeit slightly. Third, on some (rare, but...) boxes IIS has problems running with this setting enabled, reason unknown. We do have a couple of alternative solutions for such cases though, with further caveats. Basically, one size does not fit all.

Nevertheless, we will give you better control on all these settings and some other settings related to performance and scalability in the next Plesk version.

In the meantime, we will be glad to assist you in solving any related problems.

 

[jaytee]

Originally posted by mhelms
Seccondly app pools consume memory which is why the pool's are limited to 60, and why MS reccomend 2-3 pool's.

MS recommends 2-3 pools for the case when all sites belong to the same owner. Shared hosted scenario makes that recommendation impractical.

Also, pools are limited to 60 not just because they consume memory, but because each such pool allocates a desktop in a desktop heap, which has fixed size. It does not matter if you have 1GB or 8GB of RAM, the number will be 60, unless you change default IIS or system settings.

 

[Nivahost]

Hello jaytee,

I see you are activ in this topic right now, I will just ask you another quick question.

Any idea when will be Merak Mail Server support be released for Plesk 7 Windows?

Thanks

Henry

 

[jaytee]

Originally posted by Nivahost
Any idea when will be Merak Mail Server support be released for Plesk 7 Windows?

I can't give out specific dates, as they depend on other things out of my control, but the development of Merak support is almost finished. We just got an updated version of API from Merak, providing the last features we were missing, so Merak support should go in testing soon.

If you wish to help us with testing, I could provide you with beta version once it is ready.

 

[Nivahost]

Hello jaytee,

Yes, I would love to be a beta tester for this Merak project.

Please email me at: [email protected]


Regards,
Henry

 

[flyby]

Cool this is now about Merak

Well jaytee, can you make some papirs on the perfect serup one as win2k3 and plesk 7.0.2 so I can try to get a stable server?
And some guidelinie to fallow.
You must have alot of info that you not share whit us , but we need it.