Amazon EC2 & Performance Bottlenecks
About half a year ago I setup an EC2 node (small one) with a monitoring tool (PRTG) to monitor one of my clients who uses Akamai for their content delivery. The idea was to get an objective, outside view, of the site's performance.
As an interesting side effect I was also to able to monitor amazon's performance (see the graph below). Clearly there are many reasons why we see the sudden hike in the download time, but I can tell you that the site itself didn't change over that time frame and that therefore the load-time increase is either due to Akamai or Amazon. Based on the reports (or lack thereof) from the client I must assume that it's Amazon. It basically leads me to believe that something changed inside Amazon's EC2 product round and about September … interesting food for thought.
The graph above shows the load time for a full front-page download (HTTP), so this isn't just a 'ping' graph.
-niels
Sharepoint & Alternative Mappings
Ok, here some more rambling on sharepoint. The sharepoint configuration I have (MOSS 2007 + windows 2008) has two site: one on port 80 (the intranet site with normal windows authentication (not AD mind you) and the other on port xxxx (and extranet site using forms authentication using ADAM). I have two normal DNS domains names: intranet.com and extranet.com (how original). The problem I got stuck with was how to map the port xxxx for the extranet site to so that externals could simply use port 80 on MOSS to view the site. Of course there are host headers but then I still got error messages from sharepoint.
In the end it turned out that Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) was the right way to do this.
After the break are the screen shots of the configurations that worked for me