Re: Overwhelming a Web Application Server

["Haas, Matt (CL Tech Sv)" <matt.haas@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<snip>
Never tried to limit the number of connections, I assume it can be done.
By the time you factor in key to wait time for the apps we're running we
can satisfy something like 500 users per active DB connection (5000
users w/10 connection, 50,000 w/100 connections, etc.) so there's little
point in limiting the connections. But out avg DB request is well < 1ms,
and page loads (some taking 100s of db requests) are running well < 1s.
</snip>

The company I work for has some very heavily used applications and we do sometimes limit the number of active HTTP requests. They typically put this in when there isn't money for new hardware and the peaks are not frequent.

One of the applications I'm involved with will occasionally get around 60,000 individual requests in a 30 minute period from Yahoo's Search Engine Marketing crawler. This is turn makes 60,000 requestes to a web service I wrote to do inventory checking against our ERP system. The web service runs on one of our 400's and was able to handle it with 30 connections to the ERP system. The last time we were crawled, I saw a couple of no available connection messages so I bumped the max number of connections up but I'll agree with Walden on this: DB performance is generally not a problem.

Matt