Is this ASP.Net Server Resource Usage Too High?

Question

I don't have any background at all in ASP or MS server technologies, but this seems a bit odd to me -

A vendor told my company that their software (written in ASP.Net) required the following on our server(s) for every 5 users of the system.

• 2 CPUs
• 4GB of RAM

So if we have 20 users with this system (accessed via a browser over our LAN), according to the vendor, our server(s) should have 8 CPUs, and 16GB of RAM.

Am I wrong in thinking that for 20 users those systems requirements are kind of crazy? The application doesn't have to do much at all - it's largely just a database front-end that doesn't do any really specialized processing, and with less than 50,000 DB entries. It is integrated with Crystal Reports for reporting.

Does ASP.Net really have such a high resource usage? Could this just be a poorly designed application? Or am I not understanding something?

Answer 1

I think there is a big breakdown somewhere in communication, likely on the vendor's end. I can't even imagine creating an application with that sort of requirement. I am aware of multiplayer, online game servers written in Microsoft .NET which can handle many hundreds of concurrent users in near-real-time on a single CPU and 1Gig of RAM. Yes, ASP.NET adds a little bit more, as does having a RDBMS involved, but; well... if that sort of thing applied to StackExchange, it'd be impossible to run!

Anyway... ranting aside; I think miscommunication is the most likely trouble here. Any app which actually had that sort of requirement must be doing some incredible processing, and/or is written horribly.