For additional guidance on planning for performance and capacity in your Windows SharePoint Hosting deployment, see Plan for performance and capacity. The following topics, available in the section of the Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0 technical library, provide additional information and tools that you can use to determine what you need:
- Estimate performance and capacity
- Additional performance and capacity planning factors
- Tools for performance and capacity planning
Scaling SQL Server
This section introduces issues to consider when deciding how many instances of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 you will need in your Windows SharePoint Services hosting environment. Monitoring these services and periodically re-evaluating these factors will also help you determine when to add database capacity.
After you have figured out how to size your database servers, use this estimate to set the value for Site Collection Max Quota when creating a new site collection in the SharePoint Central Administration Web site.
Databases per SQL Server
For 32-bit systems, make sure your Memory to Leave setting is larger than the expected page size. With careful database tuning, it is possible to have approximately 100 databases on one computer running SQL Server. This is not an issue with systems built using 64-bit hardware.
Site Collections per Database
Limiting the number of site collections in a database to keep the database at a manageable size is recommended. If you do not change the default settings, all your sites will be in a single database. To estimate the size of database you want to support, multiply the total number of Windows SharePoint Services sites you anticipate hosting by the expected average database size. Thus, for example, if you want to limit a database to 25 gigabyes (GB), then you would limit the number of instances of 100-MB Windows SharePoint Services sites to a total of 250.
It is important to take your service level agreements into account and to involve your database administrators in deciding how large each database can be.
Adding Front-End Servers
Increasing Web application capacity for Windows SharePoint Services hosting involves adding new front-end servers when needed. The figure illustrates an environment in which a front end server has been added.
Figure: Addition of a front-end Windows SharePoint Services server
The remainder of this section describes key concepts to understand when considering when to add front-end servers to your Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0 hosting environment.
Application Pool per Front-End Windows SharePoint Services Server
Multiple worker processes may affect performance on 32-bit systems. Windows SharePoint Services application pool worker processes that are under heavy stress can reach 800 megabytes (MB) to 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM. Therefore, the best practice is to use one application pool for Windows SharePoint Services on such systems.
With 64-bit systems and larger amounts of RAM (for example, 8GB), additional worker processes pose less of a performance limitation.