Skip to main content

GoGrid vs Amazon EC2 - Cloud Hosting Continued

Image
By
So I've just completed deploying an application to my first GoGrid server, this is the same application as what I've previously deployed to my Amazon EC2 instance.
As I mentioned before the application is an ASP.NET MVC front-end with supporting WCF services running on against a Sql Server Express 2008 Database.  
Because I run a Vista development machine I was aware of the fact that running .NET MVC on IIS7.0 outperforms II6.0 with the wildcard ISAPI filter which is what I had to resort to when using my EC2 instance. What I didn't know was by just how much. 
On a general note the overall learning curve and time taken to setup the server and then deploy the application was far less than with Amazon EC2. So full credit to Go Grid for the intuitive user interface.
Also not having to concern myself with Elastic Block Stores and tracking down the Windows Server Install Disc Snapsh0t to install FTP server was a great help and thing's which have been made unnecessarily painful with Amazon EC2.
So just to give you some background on the machine specs 
Amazon EC2 
Windows Server 2003 32bit
Ram 1.66GB
2.71 GHZ 
IIS6.0
Sql Server Express 2008
GoGrid 
Windows Server 2008 64bit
1GB Ram 
3.14GHZ
IIS7.0 
.NET 3.5 SP1
Sql Server Express 2008
So once I had deployed my app on GoGrid I decided to do some basic performance testing on one of the key pages in our application. 
The page in question navigates a tree. 
So you click on a Node and then the page reloads with the Child Nodes contained in the Parent Node. Essentially like navigating a folder structure except that Child Nodes which aren't containers can be different types Images, Videos etc. Pagination is also included. 
The page is loaded and refreshed by making a jQuery $ajax Get Request to a Controller Action which renders the Html using the standard aspx template engine and then writes the result html into a div. 
e.g.
$('#result').html(result); 
The html size that is load is approximately 20kb with an additional 8kb of images. 
so here are the results as taken from Firebug console, time in milliseconds.
GoGridEC2
192292
235296
199348
210300
210286
201300
206391
328290
198291
204293
Avg: 218 Avg: 308
Overall there is quite a big difference 30% in my very basic anaylsis. 
But GoGrid responding 30% faster is definetly enough for me to revaluate my hosting options. 
The overall offering from Amazon is certainly great and because of my Video, Image content requirements approx 1TB. 
If they were offer Windows Server 2008 images then I think that would solve the problem. 
So the conclusion I have come to for the optimal cloud hosting setup is this. 
S3 Storage for all Media files
N x Amazon EC2 Instances for Media Transcoding
Amazon CloudFront for Content Delivery Network 
N x GoGrid Windows Server 2008 for the application 
GoGrid Dedicated Sql Server 2005 for database.  (or 2008 when they offer that) 
GoGrid Load Balancer. 
 
Now the next challenge will be trying to migrate 1TB of Media Content from my server into Amazon S3 cheaply and effeciently. Would love to hear if anyone has any ideas.
 
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate - Upgrade issues - Spec#

By
First of all, great news that the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate has finally been released.  Full credit to the team for the hard work on this.  You can get the download here  However this is the first time I have had upgrade issues.  Phil Haack has noted some of the issues here   If like me you have lot's of CTP's and Add-Ins then you might experience some pain in Uninstalling MVC Beta on Vista SP1  This is the list of Add-Ins / CTP's I had to uninstall to get it to work  Spec# PEX Resharper 4.1  Sourcelinks ANTS Profiler 4   Can't say I'm too impressed as it wasted over an hour of my time.  As it turned out Spec# turned out to be the offending culprit, it's forgiveable to have issues with a third party product but a Microsoft one? Guess no-one on the ASP.NET team has Spec# installed. 
Read more

Freeing Disk Space on C:\ Windows Server 2008

By Will Beattie
  I just spent the last little while trying to clear space on our servers in order to install .NET 4.5 . Decided to post so my future self can find the information when I next have to do this. I performed all the usual tasks: Deleting any files/folders from C:\windows\temp and C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Local\Temp Delete all EventViewer logs Save to another Disk if you want to keep them Remove any unused programs, e.g. Firefox Remove anything in C:\inetpub\logs Remove any file/folders C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles Remove any file/folders from C:\Users\%UserName%\Downloads Remove any file/folders able to be removed from C:\Users\%UserName%\Desktop Remove any file/folders able to be removed from C:\Users\%UserName%\My Documents Stop Windows Update service and remove all files/folders from C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution Deleting an Event Logs Run COMPCLN.exe Move the Virtual Memory file to another disk However this wasn’t enough & I found the most space was
Read more

Consuming the SSRS ReportExecutionService from a .NET Client

By
  I’ve just finished writing a nice wrapper which internally calls the SSRS ReportExecutionService to generate reports. Whilst it was fairly simple to implement there has been some major changes between 2005 and 2008 and the majority of online and documentation is based on the 2005 implementation. The most important change is that the Report Server and Report Manager are no longer hosted in IIS which will be a welcomed change to Sys Admins but makes the security model and hosting model vastly different. So far I’ve yet to figure out how to allow Anonymous Access, if anyone knows how to do this leave a comment and it will be most appreciated. Getting Started To get started you’ll want to add a service reference to http://localhost/ReportServer_SQL2008/ReportExecution2005.asmx where ReportServer_SQL2008 is the name you configure in the Reporting Services Configuration Manager. The Web Application files are located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.SQL2008\R
Read more