Single Server as a Cluster

If you only have access to 1 server for your website you may have some issues that could be solved by adding additional servers and creating a cluster. But maybe you only have a single server. Most servers these days hae at least 2 processors and 2-8 gigs of RAM.

The windows process only allows 1.3 gig per process of RAM. A simple solution is to use the web gardens of IIS 6+ however if you have a session management requirement then the web gardens will likely drop your sessions.

Another solution is to create multiple websites using host headers and redirect initial incoming traffic to another website on the single server. Simply create 3 subdomains on your DNS host. Say www1.yoursite.com, www2.yoursite.com and www3.yoursite.com. When the initial request comes in you can check for the load balancing and redirect them to the cleanest subdomain each which will use a different process and allow it to use more processors.

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