I’ve written before about how much I enjoy being a DiscountASP.NET customer for the past three years and I still have a DiscountASP.NET affiliate banner sitting at the bottom of AjaxNinja.
I have a new project that I’m working on and I had decided to give Community Server 2007 a try on a DiscountASP.NET shared account, namely because I needed Community Server’s content mirroring features.
Some misleading DiscountASP.NET advertising
DiscountASP.NET has an entire page dedicated to advertising its compatibility with Community Server 2007, which is what I had read when I signed up for an additional account. The copy for the page reads:
DiscountASP.NET ASP.NET hosting is compatible with the award-winning TelligentSystems Community Server knowledge management and collaboration application.
I assumed this meant:
- I’d be able to install and deploy community server per DiscountASP.NET’s specific CS 2007 installation instructions and
- I’d be able to use the functionality Community Server 2007 with no strings attached, given that it’s “compatible” with DiscountASP.NET hosting.
Where I got it wrong
Unfortunately, what DiscountASP.NET does not tell you is that due to Community Server 2007’s large memory footprint (~100 megabytes with little to no activity), DiscountASP.NET has to recycle the application pool frequently, sometimes as often as every 5 minutes. The DiscountASP.NET policy is to recycle an individual website’s entire pool once it reaches a size of 100 megabytes.
Here are the consequences of being forced to recycle the application pool on a CS 2007 server:
- All logged-in users are logged out;
- any posts that you may have been writing will be lost if you try to press the submit button;
- the entire website is brought to a crawl with slow load times;
- and in essence it makes Community Server 2007 unusable.
DiscountASP.NET’s response:
I emailed DiscountASP.NET a few weeks ago asking them why do they continue to advertise that they support Community Server 2007 when a basic, unmodified installation does not work; I received the following response:
Hi
If your CS2007 version will be require more than 100mb of memory, then it will get recycled when you hit the 100mb limit. We cannot change our hosting platform to accomodate for higher memory usage and currently we do not offer an alternative platform for applications that use a lot of memory resources.
Please understand that our goal is to provide a secure and reliable hosting platform for all our customers. We do not host sites in shared app pools. We host each site in their own isolated application pool. We limit the memory usage to 100mb, which is more than double of what Internet Explorer or Microsoft Word uses. Also, our platform is for shared hosting. If we took out our memory usage restriction, if you got a handful of sites using high memory applications then the box would die or hang - affecting all the other customers on the box.
Also note that many of these CMS apps continue to increase in their memory usage over time as more content is added or as more users access the site. So even if we increased the memory limit some to accomodate a CMS app, there is going to be a point in the future where the same recycling issue will occur.
Many of these CMS apps offer modules that could even be open source. If a customer chooses to use these modules, they could be poorly written and cause high memory usage.
So, does the base install of CS2007 work on our platform? The answer is yes it does. Our developers noticed that the memory usage is less than our memory limits. As for your particular site or any of our other customers, we do not know how the customer is going to be using the application or how they will be modifying it. So we cannot really provide an answer to the question: “do you support cs 2007″ We have customers running community server without issue and we have customers running community server who are having recycling issues.
Our hosting platform is secure and reliable partly because we do not allow runaway resource usage and our customers appreciate the reliability. Our business decision is to continue to limit the memory usage to 100mb because we believe that applications can be written to be robust and efficient to never hit that limit.At this time, all apps will recycle on our platform when they reach 100mb. If it is mission critical to use an application that uses more than 100mb, and if you do not wish to have the app recycle, then you will need to find an alternative host. We would recommend using a dedicated server if you want to highest uptime and unrestricted memory usage.
Notice the area I highlighted in bold. DiscountASP.NET claims that Community Server 2007 performs fine out of the box with no modification on DiscountASP.NET’s servers. That’s EXACTLY what my installation of Community Server 2007 Express Edition was. I used no plugins, nor did I use any additional themes. I didn’t even have the forums enabled! My installation had just 2 blogs and 1 photo gallery.
I’m wondering, what is DiscountASP.NET’s definition of out of the box is. Does this mean not enabling some of the base features? Does it mean that express edition specifically does not work? Who knows?
One thing I do know is that I’m not the first customer to discover DiscountASP.NET’s shortcomings when it comes to hosting Community Server 2007. I don’t care really if DiscountASP.NET can’t support Community Server 2007 properly, but I think it’s unethical for them to advertise that they do support it when in reality they cannot meet the needs of the most basic CS 2007 installations.
If anyone has a successful Community Server 2007 instance running off of a DiscountASP.NET shared host, can you please let us know how you made it work? Or even better, can someone from DiscountASP.NET show us their statistics indicating that a CS 2007 instance runs below the 100 megabyte memory limit?
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Comments 14
Interesting… Now, I wonder what answer Telligent would give as to why CS2007 uses up so much memeory? Couldn’t they optimize it to have a more minimal footprint?
Posted 31 Oct 2007 at 3:07 pm ¶Aaron, I really appreciate you posting this and the other accounts on CS Forums. That seems really high, as Chris says, but Dave Stokes says its normal (on a CS Forums thread you added to), so I believe it.
I’m currently on a VPS, but before I was on WebHost4Life for at least two years, with CS almost the whole time. No 100MB limits there.
Regards,
Posted 31 Oct 2007 at 8:30 pm ¶-Dave
If all your users are being logged out, you should probably specify a machineKey in your web.config. An app pool recycling should never cause users to be logged out, however if no machineKeys are set at the application or server level, then it will randomly generate them. In that case, the recycling would cause new ones to be generated. If you just specify them in the CS web.config, the issue will go away.
Posted 09 Nov 2007 at 1:33 pm ¶Ahhh, yes. The MachineKey trumps App Pool recycling. Thanks Ken! Let us know if this does the trick for you, Aaron.
Posted 09 Nov 2007 at 1:47 pm ¶I already uninstalled Community Server 2007 so I wouldn’t be able to tell you
Sounds like it would work. I’ll go and check on DiscountASP.NET if they let you play around with the machinekey settings or not.
Posted 09 Nov 2007 at 1:54 pm ¶That’s too bad. If they allow you access to your web.config, you have access to your machinekey. It’s a single line. You generate a key, stick it in the web.config. Here’s a CS Bit on it.
http://dbvt.com/csbits/archive/2007/05/23/an-ASP.NET-MachineKey-Generator.aspx
If you search machinekey in CS Bits you’ll find a lot of references about logouts. I’m sorry I did help you catch this before you removed CS2007.
Posted 09 Nov 2007 at 2:01 pm ¶Your right, those discountASP people did the same thing to me. They are just being generally scumbags. I’m sure they do have other users running CS without a problem, but those users are undoubtedly running some much older versions. I’ll likely put up a similar blog post and cross link you here.
Posted 09 Nov 2007 at 5:29 pm ¶Stefan,
I still think that DiscountASP.NET provides a high-quality hosting service and I’ll continue using them, but they really do need to stop advertising that they support a platform which they clearly do not.
David,
The machine key fix will act as a work-around for the login/logout issue caused by the application pool recycling so thanks for the great resource! However, it won’t fix the performance problems caused by having the app pool recycled every 5 minutes. The website was unbearably slow when I ran it.
Posted 12 Nov 2007 at 3:42 pm ¶I felt bad that we couldn’t get you the machinekey fix earlier, but you’re right that app pool recycling would have to cause some performance issues. Thanks for following-up.
Posted 12 Nov 2007 at 8:21 pm ¶The older versions of CS used to work on our hosting system. From my understanding, when CS 2007 came out we tested it and it worked on our system. Our tech team re-tested the latest CS2007 version and the base install does hit the high memory usage limit - so we took down all content about CS on our website.
Posted 26 Nov 2007 at 1:07 pm ¶We had the same issues with CS and Disconasp. We tried and worked with them but no real answer could be provided to us. We moved to Server Intellect and installed the CS. Works perfect. No more issues.
Posted 09 Jun 2008 at 1:07 pm ¶I wish I found this post before I decided refer a client to DiscountAsp.NET. I was searching for information on how to resolve the exact same issue when using the Sitefinity CMS.
Posted 12 Nov 2008 at 4:29 pm ¶Thank you for writing this article! I’m right now dealing with the same exact issue with DiscountASP,NET, but not with Community Server, but with Dot Net Nuke. Like Community Server, a Dot Net Nuke virgin install on startup will consume ~45 MB – 50 MB of memory, and with just a single user browsing it will consume about ~90MB - ~150MB of memory with no custom modules loaded. Even with all the standard best practices being implemented like disk caching vs memory caching, etc, to limit memory usage, a single default Dot Net Nuke install with a single user will use 100MB+ of memory.
Like CS, DiscountASP.NET has a whole advertising page dedicated to how “ideal” and “compatible” they are with Dot Net Nuke, which neither can be true unless you never want any users on your site at all…
Luckily, I’m still within my 30 day money back window, so hopefully I can get my full refund out of them, but I’m certainly going to be VERY vocal about this issue on blogs, news groups and web hosting message boards to hopefully help others from having this same issue.
Thx again and nice website!
Posted 15 Dec 2008 at 11:58 am ¶Ross,
Sorry to hear about that. DiscountASP.NET has great basic hosting for .NET applications, but they don’t offer anything sufficient for enterprise CMS systems.
Posted 15 Dec 2008 at 12:35 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 3
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