With the recent buzz and excitement around AspDotNetStorefront (ASPDNSF), and not to mention their amazing growth from a less than $100 shopping cart to what they are now, one can only wonder how far can this thing go? The moon? The stars? Well, it all depends on what you want to accomplish with it, and how scalable ASPDNSF is.
A little side note on the staff/team at ASPDNSF, who I had the pleasure of meeting (including the CEO – Rob Anderson) at a recent event in El Segundo hosted by them and Interprise Solutions (since they are partnered and “integrated” now). Overall, a great team and very energetic. Their hightened participation with the developer community has taken the Open Source model, to a certain extent, and brought it to the .NET community – offering their entire source code to customize as you please is a big plus. In fact, sending them recommendations for enhancements is encouraged, which is great. Keep on keeping on ASPDNSF!
Now, back to scalability… According to Wikipedia’s entry on scalability: scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged. So what does that mean for ASPDNSF?
If anything, the main area of focus for scalability concerns is with order processing – how many orders can the site process concurrently and continue to stay online. I cannot throw out any numbers because every environment is different – from hardware to bandwidth selection, and Windows to IIS optimizations.
ASPDNSF can scale very well in a Web farm and meet fairly high demands on order processing. For example, in a 4 server Web farm one can easily handle 2-3,000 orders per day and around 2-3 million hits. Selecting a good load balancer is critical, as well as configuring it right to handle requests gracefully enough so IIS can keep running smoothly.
These numbers are not entirely aligned with an “enterprise level” site (e.g. Amazon, Eastbay etc.), something Commerce Server 2007 is designed to scale and handle very well, but they are definitely ideal for small to mid-size businesses. ASPDNSF IS, which is still in its “birth phase”, offers more room for growth since the Web admin system has been removed and now entirely resides using the IS client-based Windows applications (this is very similar to the strategy Commerce Server 2007 has taken).
Some other key features to consider with ASPDNSF, so as to not put you in fear of how scalable it is:
- FAST SQL option on queries (increased db performance)
- Built in page and data caching
- Designed to handle up to 500,000 SKUs (ML/IS versions)
Another thing to consider are some of the impressive sites already running on ASPDNSF. Below are numbers/stats (collected from Compete) for some of the sites listed on ASPDNSF’s gallery:
- Crocs.com – 250,000 visitors per month
- InPhonic.com – 4M visitors per month
- ReStockIt.com – 150,000 visitors per month
That’s about it! Comments are welcome, and keep checking back for more ASPDNSF and Commerce Server articles.
