Trevor Power

Software development and other thoughts

Posts Tagged Blacknight

A limitation of shared hosting and a push toward cloud computing

Feb 27

Posted by trevorpower in Software Development | 1 Comment

Today I ran into one of the limitations of shared hosting.

I’ve been struggling for the last few weeks to handle large files in my application. I published to the server earlier this week but with no success. All my tests failed after 10 minutes with a ‘Request timed out’ error. I was testing with an 80mb file but with a slow broadband connection (thanks to Ice). I had increased the timeout and max request length for the upload handler like so in the web.config:

   <location path="Upload.mvc/Upload">
      <system.web>
         <httpRuntime  maxRequestLength="2097151" executionTimeout="10800" />
      </system.web>
   </location>

I ruled out any setting that I had control over, so the next step was to talk to my hoster, Blacknight, to see if they could help me out. They replied saying that they could not support the uploading of large files stating that:

It ties up too much system resources to upload huge files like that through asp and would cause problems for other users on the shared server.

Of course they’re right and I can’t really complain but it’s bitterly disappointing none the less.

For the foreseeable future, a couple of file uploads a month is all I require so I don’t want to pay for more expensive hosting packages. So back to the drawing board…

Cloud computing

I’m already using the Amazons S3 service for the storage of the images and I think I can upload directly from the client to S3. So I just need a high spec PC for a few minutes to process the files after the user has uploaded them. Once processed I will only ever have to deal with smaller versions or tiled sections. This looks like an ideal candidate for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Where I can pay by the hour for a high spec machine.

I was hoping to dip my toe into some cloud computing at some point but I didn’t want to be pushed. This is going to be a lot more work than I hoped and will need some effort just to cordinate between the web server, client machine and a cloud computer.

I haven’t decided on the final architecture yet, just thinking out loud, but looks like a lot of fun (and hard work) ahead…

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ASP.Net MVC on Blacknight

Nov 30

Posted by trevorpower in Software Development | 4 Comments

Update: SP1 is now installed for ASP.Net 3.5. So now the only DLL you need to upload is ‘System.Web.Mvc.dll’.

I was reading a little bit about the new ASP.Net MVC stuff. I think it would be ideal for my Tadmap (image hosting) project. Before I started any major development re-work I needed to check that my hosting provider, Blacknight, could host it.
So I uploaded the sample MVC application. Of course it didn’t work at first but I don’t give up that easily and it is now up and running. I think the following steps will work for anybody else trying the same.
As Blacknight do not have SP1 installed for ASP.Net 3.5 you have to upload the new DLLs when you deploy. Simple instructions can be found here, Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC.

My windows account on Blacknight is using IIS 6.0 which does not automatically support MVC. In order to handle URLs the MVC way you will need to follow the instructions here, ASP.NET MVC on IIS 6 Walkthrough. Basically, you just need to grab the code for the Global.asax.cs file and add a ‘.mvc’ file mapping using your Blacknight control panel.
To add the file mapping, just go to the ‘Web’ tab of your domain and add ‘mvc’ to the ASP.Net 2 mappings. It should look like the image below and make sure that ‘Script Engine’ is ‘On’ and ‘Verify File Exists’ is ‘Off’.

One small (cosmetic) problem is that the URLs aren’t as clean as they should be because the ‘mvc’ extension is needed. So the URL for the About action of the Home controller that should look like ‘http://trevorpower.com/Home/About‘ instead looks like ‘http://trevorpower.com/Home.mvc/About‘. I have seen solutions to this problem as well but that’s for another day. Right now I have the not so small task of converting an existing ASP.Net application to an ASP.Net MVC application.

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