ASP.NET Performance – Windows Update – a great example for setting performance standards

July 27, 2009 · 2 min read

Much as people love hearing on  the new features of ASP.NET, one of the frequent requests that I receive is around performance counters, high transactional sites using ASP.NET and real world applications that do very well on ASP.NET.  While there are thousands of sites out there running on ASP.NET, many of them being mission critical, our own Windows Update is a great example of high performance.

Windows Update is something all of us use, whether we like it or not.  It helps maintain your system up to date with critical patches, recommended downloads as well as optional add-ins.  Windows Update also periodically provides major updates such as Service Pack for Windows Vista, Office etc., and it is an essential part of your Windows usage.

How does Windows Update cater to a huge use base of an operating system such as Windows and maintains all the transactions / requests for downloads.  Well, the facts, also available in Wikipedia, is as below:-

As of 2008, Windows Update has about 500 million clients, processes about 350 million unique scans per day, and maintains an average of 1.5 million simultaneous connections to client machines.  On Patch Tuesday, the day Microsoft typically releases new software updates, outbound traffic can exceed 500 gigabits per second. Approximately 90% of all clients use automatic updates to initiate software updates, with the remaining 10% using the Windows Update web site. The web site is built using ASP.NET, and processes an average of 60,000 page requests per second.

I think that is quite a huge number of requests per second and to maintain that using IIS, SQL Server as well as Windows Server, it really requires platform stability and performance.

Another great example of performance is our own www.microsoft.com group portal which caters to millions of requests per second on a day to day basis.

Note: The facts and figures are as gathered by me from wikipedia and various other resources and must be used for information purposes only.  The opinions are solely mine and do not reflect those of my employer in any way.

Update: Since quite a few folks pointed out, I wanted to also add that "Just as in Cricket, where you cannot set fielding for Bad Bowling, no technology can help bad coding/design.  It is implied although worth mentioning that best practices, reviews and performance tuning can help improve performance of your application"

Cheers !

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Harish Ranganathan

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