ServerSide

Come build awesome web technology at LeanServer!

Mike Volodarsky — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:30:00 GMT

Join our crack team of expert developers to build great web platform tech! We are looking for a passionate software developer in the Philadelphia area office....(read more)

Sentinel demo at Philly Tech Meetup tonight!

Mike Volodarsky — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:14:00 GMT

We are coming to Philly Tech Meetup tonight to present Sentinel, which is one week away from the start of our first public beta! Its been a crazy few weeks getting everything ready for primetime, and we've accomplished a tremendous amount - getting Sentinel into the cloud, automatic installation and update infrastructure, completing our new Azure blob based data storage and query engine, and a whole lot of other last minute features. We are super excited to show this off tonight. If you are coming...(read more)

Join the beta! Explore, analyze, and instantly diagnose your production ASP.NET applications.

Mike Volodarsky — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:27:00 GMT

Monitor, explore, and instantly diagnose ASP.NET applications in production. The Sentinel beta will for the first time make available our instant diagnosis features, which help identify the root cause of top applications problems - like server resource overload, application errors, and slowdowns/hangs. The beta kicks off on August 3rd. ...(read more)

New LeanServer.com and the LeanServer Lab

Mike Volodarsky — Thu, 12 May 2011 20:48:00 GMT

In the LeanServer Lab, we are making available all of the tools and frameworks that we have built for our clients, with many more scheduled to come this year. Are you running an enterprise application on the Microsoft platform? We’d love to partner with you to help your web infrastructure be the best it can be. Let us know what you are doing, and how our technology can help....(read more)

Join us to build an awesome web interface for our cutting edge products

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:24:00 GMT

Are you a front-end / JavaScript master? Are you in the Philadelphia area? Do you want to design and build awesome web interfaces that bring our products to life? For more info, check out our stack overflow post . We are looking for someone who can start immediately as we have a lot of exciting stuff that needs to get done, like, yesterday! Regards, Mike Volodarsky CTO LeanServer LLC Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

LeanServer needs an amazing technical evangelist

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 23:20:00 GMT

LeanServer has been up to a lot this past year (also making it harder to blog). We've built some exciting scalability tech for clients, released our first product, and have several more exciting things in the pipeline. Now, we need to take things to the next level - by getting the word out about our products, creating powerful success stories, and growing our customer base. We need someone who is both technical enough to get and demo our products, and is amazing at writing, making demos, social...(read more)

Reliably uploading very large files with the Reliable Transfer Client

Mike Volodarsky — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:24:00 GMT

Improving large file uploads on the web with Reliable Transfer Client. While we initially built ScaleUP to improve upload scalability for high-traffic environments like MySpace, it soon became fairly obvious that uploads pose many other challenges - and not all of them on the server. ...(read more)

Caution when stopping and starting an IIS application pool with appcmd

Mike Volodarsky — Wed, 12 May 2010 04:24:00 GMT

When starting and stopping IIS 7 application pools from command line with appcmd.exe, you should be aware of a behavior that can sometimes lead to unintended circumstances. To explain it, lets first review what happens when you stop an application pool with the InetMgr.exe tool: 1) Set the autoStart property of the <applicationPool> configuration element to false . This causes WAS to not start any worker processes when a new request to an application mapped to the application pool arrives....(read more)

Enabling Fast, Reliable, and Super-Scalable Uploads in ASP.NET, ASP, and PHP applications

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:39:00 GMT

Uploads have always historically been a major pain point for web applications, due to poor performance, spotty reliability, and framework-specific limitations. Today, LeanServer is releasing a breakthrough web upload solution for the Microsoft IIS platform that finally enables fast, reliable, and super-scalable HTTP uploads to any web application....(read more)

Brief History of Web Uploads

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:59:00 GMT

A brief history of HTTP upload support in the Microsoft web platform, and the challenges behind enabling reliable and scalable uploads for ASP.NET, ASP, and PHP applications....(read more)

Help LeanServer grow - become a part of our expert developer team

Mike Volodarsky — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:20:00 GMT

In the last 6 months, LeanServer has deployed several high performance web technologies with some of the biggest names in the web. It’s been a very intense ride, but totally worth it when seeing the impact we can have in a large-scale web environment - and the grins on the faces of people running it. As we approach our first public launch, expect to see more info and some names named on our website in the next several months. We’ve also invested extensively in our internal development...(read more)

LeanServer needs a rockstar .NET Developer in the Philadelphia area

Mike Volodarsky — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:08:00 GMT

Things have been pretty hectic. Although I haven't blogged about this much, I've been working on LeanServer , a new company I started last year. LeanServer is a technical expert in scalability and performance for very large web sites, with multiple technologies and tools aimed at making these sites scale and significantly reduce operational costs. This is a direct continuation of my work on the ASP.NET/IIS 7.0 teams over the previous 5 years - taking all the great platform features we built,...(read more)

Troubleshooting performance counter problems with PerfMon and a debugger

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 24 May 2009 04:17:00 GMT

Performance counters are a wonderful tool when it comes to quickly assessing system health and performance of Windows subsystems. In addition to learning much about the operation of Microsoft products, exposing performance counters from your own code can be extremely valuable for the very same reasons. We do this a lot for LeanServer code – and it saves a lot of time and money when it comes to monitoring, diagnostics, and performance analysis in production. As with many things, performance...(read more)

Be a part of the energy revolution / Help Save Kilowatt Ours

Mike Volodarsky — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:44:00 GMT

I dont usually post activist stuff on the blog, but I have to make an exception in this case. A year ago, I caught a late night showing of Jeff Barrie's Killowatt Ours, a 1 hour long film about the true impact of energy production on our environment, our health, and the extent to which we can help meet our growing energy demands by simply reducing our energy footprint. Lets just say the film was eye-opening, even given the fact that I've been in the energy field in one way or another for...(read more)

Workaround for using IIS 7 url authorization with ASP.NET roles

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:33:00 GMT

When using the IIS 7.0 Integrated pipeline, you gain access to a ton of cool scenarios where IIS and ASP.NET features work together to provide value for your application – regardless of the application content. Most of these features involve using ASP.NET features (e.g.Forms Authentication) to provide their services for non-ASP.NET content. These have been at the core of most of the demos we did while developing the Integrated pipeline, and consequently are the most well known. The other major...(read more)

Fun with file locking

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 06:33:00 GMT

If you are developing code that uses distributed synchronization or messaging, you sometimes might need to use files as a locking mechanism. This can be useful because files are persistent (beyond thread, process, or even power session lifetime), and access to them is synchronized between multiple processes if you select the proper file access and sharing modes. C# example of taking a file lock: using ( FileStream lockFile = new FileStream ( lockPath, FileMode .OpenOrCreate, FileAccess .ReadWrite,...(read more)

Analyzing server power consumption and costs

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:05:00 GMT

For many data centers, the cost of powering servers has become a top budget item. The first step to reducing power costs lies in understanding the power characteristics of your server equipment and workloads. We started with a simple power meter and a tool to monitor and correlate power data ......(read more)

IIS 7.0 Url Rewriter gotchas when importing mod_rewrite rules

Mike Volodarsky — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:16:00 GMT

One of the best things to happen to IIS 7.0 recently is the release of Url Rewriter , the IIS 7.0 url rewriting equivalent to Apache's mod_rewrite. To ease the process of migrating Apache apps (notably PHP applications that rely on mod_rewrite rules for SEF / friendly urls), the Url Rewriter IIS Manager snapin includes an import function that can import mod_rewrite rules automatically. Apparently not everyone knows about this little gem, so if you need to get mod_rewrite rules running on IIS...(read more)

IIS 7.0 Forms Authentication and Embedded Media Players

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:04:00 GMT

One of the useful benefits of IIS 7.0 and the ASP.NET Integrated mode is the ability to protect all content using ASP.NET Forms Authentication. In the past, people would often protect the application pages themselves, and leave images and media content open for public access. It wasn’t easy to extend the same internet-based authentication scheme to static content unless the static content was served through custom handlers. Even this wasn’t a perfect solution as you’d often lose...(read more)

When to restart IIS when making changes to your application

Mike Volodarsky — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:02:00 GMT

Knowing when to restart IIS to pick up various types of changes to your application has traditionally been a challenge. IIS and ASP.NET are both stateful software systems, which heavily rely on cached state that is loaded once to provide high performance. They also recognize the downside of being stateful - having to refresh the state when the underlying data changes - and most of the time provide mechanisms for picking up the changes automagically (typically via file change notifications/ReadDirectoryChangesW)....(read more)

Leverage the Top 10 Performance Improvements in IIS 7.0

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:40:00 GMT

IIS 7.0 improves on the already solid performance of its predecessor in quite a few places. But the real power lies in the new capabilities IIS 7.0 provides that can significantly improve performance, scalability, and reduce operational costs of running web applications...(read more)

Trace IIS 7.0 Errors Like a Pro with Failed Request Tracing

Mike Volodarsky — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:25:00 GMT

When dealing with hard to find IIS 7.0 errors, I break out the trusty Failed Request Tracing. My favorite way of doing this is through the command line...(read more)

Make your next IIS 7.0 web server a lean one

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 04:04:00 GMT

Among IT circles, IIS 7.0’s modularity is definitely one of its most welcomed traits. It promises a significantly reduced surface area, lightweight management overhead, and better performance. Ever wonder how far you can go with modularizing IIS 7.0? ...(read more)

The next step

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 27 May 2008 05:46:00 GMT

It's been one week since I left Microsoft, and what a week its been! I dont remember the last time I was on so little sleep :) I'll be making some changes to www.mvolo.com and posting more info about the new stuff shortly. I have to say though that my focus is still almost completely on IIS 7.0 and related Windows Server 2008 tech. In the past week, I've been doing more learning and writing code than I have in a long time, which has been extremely exciting. I've been working on and...(read more)

Connecting to IIS 7.0 configuration remotely with Microsoft.Web.Administration

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 27 May 2008 03:20:00 GMT

IIS 7.0 provides a number of APIs that you can use to manage configuration remotely. This post provides the info and tools you need to configure remote access to IIS 7.0 configuration, including for use on Server Core installations....(read more)