DotNetNuke Keep Alive Utility

[Renegade]

I just released a mini-utility to help keep DNN installations alive and out of the garbage collector. You can find it here:

DNN Keep Alive

It's free.

Cheers,

Ryan

[mouser]

now i just have to learn what dot net nuke is, and why i need it out of garbage collector, and then why i need to keep it alive..

[jgpaiva]

now i just have to learn what dot net nuke is, and why i need it out of garbage collector, and then why i need to keep it alive..

LoL... I had the exact same thought..

[Renegade]

Hahaha~!

DotNetNuke is an ASP.NET CMS (Content Management System). Think of Joomla or Mambo.

The ASP.NET process keeps web applications in memory for only so long, then recycles them (drops them from memory) and unloads all the DLLs (this is what the garbage collector does).

The result is that the application is no longer in memory and when you go to load it up again, ASP.NET needs to load the DLLs again and get the web application up and running. This takes time so there's a massive performance hit and the first page takes a long time to load.

New sites or low volume sites suffer from this problem.

I built the application for someone else who has a new site that he's building in DNN. I then just polished it up a bit and released it. I'm thinking of doing a pro version for any ASP.NET applciation, but I've already got way too many things on my plate right now. I need to get some of them off first. (Or let my ADHD kick in and get distracted with it!  )

Cheers,

Ryan

[JavaJones]

So remind me why anyone would want to do a CMS in .NET then?

- Oshyan

[Renegade]

So remind me why anyone would want to do a CMS in .NET then?

The problem only affects new sites that basically have no traffic. Once you've got some traffic coming in, things pan out and the application stays in memory.

It's a good system, but it hits new sites a bit hard. This is the fix.

[JavaJones]

That doesn't exactly answer the question. But oh well.

- Oshyan

[Renegade]

That doesn't exactly answer the question. But oh well.

Blah - My bad.

.NET offers you a lot more than something like PHP. (I'm not interested in any ASP.NET vs. PHP fights - it's just a fact that ASP.NET out of the box offers a lot more than PHP out of the box.)

There is so much to .NET and so much that you can do with it. It's also very RAD. You just get things done a lot faster than with something like ASP or PHP. There's no comparison. Yeah - yeah... If you want to write a 3 line script, then ASP or PHP is faster. But really... If you are developing anything of any size, you'll get a lot more mileage out of ASP.NET. And you've still got the option of using almost any language that you want, e.g. C#, J#, VB.NET, Perl.Net, etc.

If you maintain any number of sites with more than a few pages, you'll know that you just can't do it efficiently without a CMS.

Then again, if you know PHP really well, then the learning curve may be too expensive and you may want something like Joomla. There are some very large sites that run on Joomla, Mambo and other spinoffs or other PHP CMSes.

One real downside to DotNetNuke is that some of the 3rd party developers of some of the modules are complete ers...

I could relate some horror stories, but it's late, and I couldn't do so without resorting to profanity.

But then again, that goes all across software. There are complete ers all over the place. I'm quite sure that everyone has encountered them. The guys that provide zero support when you find bugs or when the product doesn't do what it says it does.

But at the end of the day, whichever platform someone chooses for their application should just match what they need. Once I can easily afford another server, I plan to get a LAMP box so that I can run some stuff that just doesn't work on Windows servers.