We are currently using MVC3, .NET4.5, EF6.1, MSSQL2008(dev), SQL Azure(Test and Live). Our application is quite complicated and we are encountering significant warm up lags, around 30 secs, after an application pool refresh. We use External autoping services to keep the sites warm, which are OKish.... However it would be a much better solution to just deploy native images, and then whenever a app pool refreshes for whatever reasons, we know the application will load as quickly as possible.
Hence the reason for investigating NGEN.
However I am unsure whether this is possible for Azure Websites. Some questions I have:
1) NGen requires Admin privilege. As I understand it I would need admin privilege to install Native images to Azure Websites, or can I generate them on a local "same cpu" machine and copy them across?
2) Require Full Trust now. I believe this is no issue with WAWS.
3) Does NGen only install in Cache and not produce some sort of file for copying to a different location?
Thanks inadvance.
Related
I'm currently running Umbraco on a web app for Microsoft Azure. Anytime I enable scaling out and the web app starts scaling out, I get the error:
"Process cannot access the file, Examine Indexes write.lock because it is being used by another file.
The website then needs to be restarted before it becomes fully functioning again. Is there a setting on Umbraco that I'm missing?
Or is it something that happens with Azure Web Apps Auto Scaling features?
This sounds like an issue with the indexes. Your index appears to be getting locked when scaling out. Ideally if you're running on a load balanced environment, you should have a single index for all environments instead of on a per instance basis. I've used Azure Search in the past and it's worked perfectly, swapping out the index isn't too difficult with Umbraco, plenty of information available online. Good example here
In the future you shouldn't need to restart the entire site, rebuilding the indexes should be fine.
Also, what version of Umbraco are you running? This may be of some help, I encountered some similar issues a few months ago - unrelated to scaling though.
https://issues.umbraco.org/issue/U4-10735
Sounds like you need to isolate your index files so they aren’t shared across the difference instances and don’t lock each other out. There’s a few ways to do this based on the version you are running, but in 7.3, i think you update the index file location to include the instance name like ~/App_Data/TEMP/ExamineIndexes/{machinename}/Internal/
For more details, see https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/getting-started/setup/server-setup/load-balancing/flexible#if-you-plan-on-using-auto-scaling
In the Azure Management Portal, you can configure your website. As an example, you can change the PHP version your website is using. When you have edited a configuration option, you have to click “Save”.
So far, so good. But you also have the option to restart your site (by clicking “Restart“ next to “Save”).
My question is, when should you restart your website? Are there some configuration changes that require a restart, and others that don't? I haven't found any hints in the user interface.
Are there other situations that require a restart? Say, the website has been running for a given time without a restart?
Also, what are the consequences of restarting a website? Does it affect cookies/sessions in any way (i.e. delete a user's shopping cart or log them out)? Are there any other consequences I should be aware of?
Generally speaking, you may want to restart your website because of application performance issues. For example, you may have a memory leak in your application, connections not getting closed, or other things that would degrade the performance of the application over time. As you monitor your website and observe conditions like this you may make a decision to restart it. Even better, you may even automate the task of restarting when these conditions occurr. Anyway, these kinds of things are not unique to Azure Websites. You would take similar actions for a website running on-premises.
As for configuration changes, if you make a change to your web.config file, this change is detected and your website would be restarted automatically for you. Similarily, if you were to make configuration changes in the CONFIG page of your website in the Azure Management Portal such as application settings, connection strings, etc., then Azure Websites will detect this change to your environment and automatically restart it.
Indeed, restarting a website will result in any session data kept in memory being lost for that instance. Additionally, if you have startup/initialization code that takes time to complete then that will have to be rerun. Again, this is not anything unique to Azure Websites though.
I have been playing around with Kudu on an IIS development server and succeeded in making it deploy a hello world site etc.
But I was wondering if there was some resources on how to deploy Kudu in larger environments. So that you can quickly add new server nodes (virtual) to balance load.
Is there some approach to manage multiple Kudu deployments from a centralized location? I know It has an REST API and obviously we can probably use this, but that sort of requires some development, so was just looking to see if there was an existing solution out there.
But So far I have either searched after the wrong thing on Google, or there isn't much of what I need.
Does anyone have any experience in running it in larger environments with many servers?
I am developing a website that I intend to run within Windows Azure using a single Web Role. The site will make use of the Sphinx Search engine which will need to run as a Windows Service. So, my question is this...is it possible to install the Sphinx Search Windows Service inside of a Web Role.
From my initial research into Azure I am thinking "yes" for the reason that the Web Role is a VM running IIS. Therefore I should be able to remote in, install the service, and it should work. :)
Does this sound right?
Installing software via RDP is not a viable solution with Web/Worker role instances, as these changes won't persist. You need to install it either from a startup script or from OnStart(). Since you want to install as a service, that would imply startup script, since it would need elevated permissions. Note: The installer must support unattended mode, where all parameters are specified via command line with no human interaction.
What about scalability? If you have more than one instance of your web role running, can sphinx run across two instances? From what I read, it supports ODBC-compliant databases, and you might be able to use it against Windows Azure SQL Database. If that's the case, can two sphinx engines run on two different machines accessing the same data store? If so, this sounds like a viable solution.
If installation cannot be automated, or you need something additional like MySQL, you may want to consider placing the sphinx search engine inside a Virtual Machine (new in June 2012). Now you can spin up a Windows 2008 Server, RDP into it, configure it exactly how you want it.
Strictly speaking yes, you could do that. However this makes the assumption that you would be running on one VM instance and also that the instance would never need restarting.
You should consider looking at Azure worker roles for any functionality that would normally exist as a windows service.
After reading your answers, and thinking about it a bit more, I think dropping the idea of installing a service would be the best course of action. I've been looking at the API for Lucene.NET (this may be the same for Sphinx) and it's possible to encapsulate the writing/managing of indexes, etc, within in code and therefore no need for a service.
For the Azure, there is a library for managing index files using both local and Azure storage which could be of use. Scenarios I've read about show that it's then possible to have a Web Role that will process HTTP requests and perform the searches and a Worker Role to accept DB changes via a queue and have it write them to the indexes.
I have a Windows application that does some calculations and is called from command line. On my Windows machine, I have a PHP script running under Apache that executes the application and shows the output.
Is there any hosting solution that I can use to do the same? I can't figure out if EC2 or Azure are the right solutions. Basically, I need a web server + ability to execute my application.
Suggestions? Thanks.
You can host your application on AppHarbor, the .NET Platform-as-a-Service. You can either port your web frontend to .NET or try to get your PHP stuff working with Phalanger. AppHarbor is working on Background Tasks, which might be a good match for your workload.
I would just run the PHP script you already have under IIS in a Windows Azure web role.
If it is a Windows Application and you have the source code I would go with an Azure Worker Role. The advantage of using a PaaS (as Azure) instead of an IaaS (as Amazon) is that you wont have to bother of keeping the server up to date.
The real investment in time will be when you rewrite your application to make it work as a Worker Role. The time needed to do this work depends on how your application works right now. If is uses a lot of disc access it might be difficult and perhaps an Amazon server would be better. But if it only crunches numbers in memory an Azure Worker Role is a very good candidate.
The real advantage of using an Amazon server is that you probably wont need to do any work at all. Except maintaining the server.
As described in the question both Azure and EC2 will do the job very well. This is the kind of task both systems are designed for.
So the question becomes really: which is best? That depends on two things: what the application needs to do and your own experience and preference.
As it's a Windows application there should probably be a leaning towards Azure. While EC2 supports Windows, the tooling and support resources for Azure are probably deeper at this point.
If cost is a factor then a (somewhat outdated) resource is here: http://blog.mccrory.me/2010/10/30/public-cloud-hourly-cost-comparison/ -- the conclusion is that, by and large, Azure and Amazon are roughly similar for compute charges.
Steve Marx has a blog post that describes how to run another web server (i.e not IIS) on Azure
This potentially has everything you need - you can deploy Apache and your executable and run it in exactly the same way.
Alternatively - you can deploy your executable along side a bit of code in a worker role that would run that application periodically, all depending on your exact requirements