Technical difference between web garden and web farm?

Question

Need to know the implementation difference between web garden and web form in case of .net application hosting on iis 7.

Can any one provide me a detail information related to the same.

Answer 1

A web garden setting on IIS7 (covered here IIS and web garden configuration) allows IIS to spawn multiple worker processes for an IIS Virtual Directory to scale up when IIS gets multiple simultaneous calls. This simulates the effect of scaling out to a Web Farm (where the Virtual Directory exists on multiple IIS installations on seperate boxes under an NLB).

Why is this important ? If you code your .net IIS application without Web Garden turned on in IIS you wont recognise that you have accidentally coded a "sticky" service with affinity between the client and the web service, typically using caches incorrectly or chaining business calls on the same server generating a unexpected state dependency.

I typically instruct all my teams to develop with Web Garden turned on for their local IIS to make sure they dont stumble into issues that would hurt in a scaled out environment.