I'm stress testing a site that we're making, and we're finding a very surprising result compared to my expectations:
Our site starts to load very slow with a few hundred simultaneous people, even though CPU and memory are fine. Looking at Task Manager, Networking tab, I see that my 100 Mbps network card is maxed out at 98%.
For some reason, this sounds extremely ridiculous to me...
Every time I read something on scalability it's CPU, Memory, Caching, etc, etc, and here I'm getting the bottleneck on the network card itself.
We serve all our content gzipped, and our home page is kind of heavy, but not THAT much. I would've never expected the network card to be the bottleneck.
Is this normal?
Is everyone having public facing websites using a 1Gbps network card?
I thought 100 Mbps would be the standard.
Am I looking at something wrong? Am I interpreting the graph in the Networking tab incorrectly?
NOTE: I can think of a number of ways to fix this, starting with getting a 1 Gbps card, and moving static files to their own server(s). My question is mostly around whether everyone is simply using 1 Gbps connections, which would surprise me enormously.