What is the difference between Web Farm and Web Garden ? October 1, 2010

I have been asked this question many times by different readers of my blog. They wanted to know about the fundamentals of Web Farms and Web Garden . In this blog post  I am going to explain the what is the exact difference between web farm and web garden, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using them. I have also described how to create web garden in different version of IIS.

Overview :

Visual Studio having its own integrated ASP.NET engine which is used to run the ASP.NET Web application from Visual Studio. ASP.NET Development Server  is responsible for execute all the request and response from client. Now after the end of development, when you want to host the site on some server to allow other peoples to access, concept of web servers comes in between.  A web server is responsible for  provide the response for all the requests that are coming from clients. Below diagram showing the typical deployment structure of a ASP.NET Web application with a single IIS.

Clients request for resources and IIS Process the request and send back to clients. If you want to know more details on How IIS Process the request please read one of my article over “How IIS Process ASP.NET Request ?” .

Web Farm :

This is the case, where you have only one web server and multiple clients requesting for the resources from the same server. But when there is huge numbers of  incoming traffic for your web sites, one standalone server is not sufficient to process the request.  You may need to use multiple server to host the application and divide the traffic among them.  This is called “Web Farm” . So when you are hosting your single web site on multiple web server over load balancer called “Web Farm”. Below diagram showing the over all representation of Web Farms.

(more…)