Question

I´m deploying a small Silverlight application, which consumes data from a WCF DataService then exposes data from a SQLServer Database.

The expected number of visitors of my the site is a few thousand (about 6000), but the site will be their work tool, so all these visitors will constantly use it, and data will be constantly retrieved.

Can someone tell me about the minium hardware requirements the server must have in order to get good performance from my application?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I hate these types of questions because the answer is always “it depends”.

The hardware requirements depends on:

• The amount of data that you’re exposing (sending to the client)
• The amount of data that you’re storing (saving from the client)
• The amount of processing that you do on SQL Server (triggers, stored procedures, etc.)

Since your question is pretty bare of details, I’m going to have to presume that your architecture is pretty bare of details as well. Because of that, I would just deploy it on whatever you have available.

Here’s what I would do:

1. Get the fastest processor you can scrounge up with as much RAM as you can scrounge up and build a test server.
2. Develop your app
3. Test your app against the test server.

Now, if it’s running slow, try to find bottlenecks and get it running quickly. Then, with that as a baseline, try to get an estimate of how much processing one person can generate and multiply that by 6,000. Better yet, multiply it by 12,000 to insure that you have enough for peak capacity.

That’s your starting point.