Would this speed up my website

[Jane Hopkins]

We have an asp.net website where the web server is outside our network while
the database is inside. In order to talk to the database the web site has to
go through various security layers and this means it is slow as there is a
lot of talking to the database.

Is there some way I could set up a second web server *inside* our network,
so that this second web server does all the database interaction, and just
talks to the outer web server, receiving HTTP requests and sending back the
web pages and other files to the "outer" web server which is the public
facing server that browsers connect to?

To speed things up further, could I put all the non-aspx files on the outer
web server and just leave those that interact with the database to
communicate through the security layer?

Something like this:

<DB> <--inner web server--> || SECURITY ZONE Z|| <-- outer web server--><--
browsers

Is this possible? How could it work in practise?

 

[bruce barker]

yes its possible and is a common solution. its called a reverse proxy. you
can build aone yourself, usually a httpmodule, or buy a commerical product
(usually hardware).

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

 

[Naraendirakumar R.R.]

Hi:
Microsoft has a product called ISA Server which is a somewhat decent
product. Scroll to the reverse proxy section of this article.
http://www.isaserver.org/tutorials/...guration_Web_caching_and_Internet_access.html

If you expect a heavy load, a hardware appliance would be the way to go.

I've also seen people setup Apache on Linux as a low cost & less complex
alternative, which can scale really well. The linux world has a lot of
documentation on how to do this.

Cheers,
-Naraen

 

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

Something else that you can do that's fairly simple is to analyze the number
of round-trip operations you need to make to the db. You can then get an
idea of what items you can group together. For example, if you load a series
of default values for a form, such as states and countries, see if you can't
use only one call to return the data, thus reducing the round-trip by half.
Also see where you could cache data, such as the states data in the previous
example.

I only mention this because a lot of developers don't optimize enough and
limiting round-trips and caching often used but fairly static data get
pretty good speed improvements for the time spent working on them.

 

[Jane Hopkins]

Thanks to everyone - this is exactly what I was looking for!