Adding more hardware v/s refactoring code under a time crunch
Background:
Enterprise application - very will written for its time in 2004. 

Stack:
.NET, Heavy use of Remoting, ASMX style web services, SQL Server

Problem:
The application allows user to go through various wizards for lack of a better term, all of their actions are stored in what we call "wizard state", which is essentially XML that is persisted to a SQL server database very frequently because we allow users to pause/resume their application. Often in these wizards, the XML that comprises the wizard state grows very large, I'm talking 5-8 MB of data, and we noticed that when we had a sudden influx of simultaneous users, we started receiving occasional timeouts against the database, because a lot of what the wizard state is comprised of, is keeping track of collections of "things". Sometimes these custom collections grow very large.

Question:
We were in a meeting today and we're expecting a flurry of activity in October that will test the system like never before, and possibly result in huge wizard states that go back and forth from the web server to the database. The crux of the situation is that there is only one database and one web server. 

For arguments sake, because of the complexity of the application, lets say adding any kind of clustering/mirroring to increase database throughput is out of the question. I spoke up in the meeting and said the quickest way to address this in the shortest time period would be to add more servers to the front end web application so the load could be distributed amongst web servers. The development lead said I was completely wrong and it would have no effect because we only have one database, so adding more web power would do nothing. He is having one of the other developers reduce the xml bloat that we persist frequently to the database. Probably in the long run, reducing the size of the xml that we pass back and forth is the right idea, but will adding additional web servers truly have no effect, I just think in terms of simultaneous users, it *should* help. 

Any responses thoughts are appreciated, proof that more web servers would help would be pure win.

Thanks.



Adding more hardware v/s refactoring code under a time crunch
===

Background:
Enterprise application - very will written for its time in 2004. 

Stack:
.NET, Heavy use of Remoting, ASMX style web services, SQL Server

Problem:
The application allows user to go through various wizards for lack of a better term, all of their actions are stored in what we call "wizard state", which is essentially XML that is persisted to a SQL server database very frequently because we allow users to pause/resume their application. Often in these wizards, the XML that comprises the wizard state grows very large, I'm talking 5-8 MB of data, and we noticed that when we had a sudden influx of simultaneous users, we started receiving occasional timeouts against the database, because a lot of what the wizard state is comprised of, is keeping track of collections of "things". Sometimes these custom collections grow very large.

Question:
We were in a meeting today and we're expecting a flurry of activity in October that will test the system like never before, and possibly result in huge wizard states that go back and forth from the web server to the database. The crux of the situation is that there is only one database and one web server. 

For arguments sake, because of the complexity of the application, lets say adding any kind of clustering/mirroring to increase database throughput is out of the question. I spoke up in the meeting and said the quickest way to address this in the shortest time period would be to add more servers to the front end web application so the load could be distributed amongst web servers. The development lead said I was completely wrong and it would have no effect because we only have one database, so adding more web power would do nothing. He is having one of the other developers reduce the xml bloat that we persist frequently to the database. Probably in the long run, reducing the size of the xml that we pass back and forth is the right idea, but will adding additional web servers truly have no effect, I just think in terms of simultaneous users, it *should* help. 

Any responses thoughts are appreciated, proof that more web servers would help would be pure win.

Thanks.


