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Dedicating Servers to Distributed Cache in SharePoint 2013

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I think I’ve been asked questions about this a half dozen times in the last month, so I decided to just capture my thoughts in a blog past and as always, let you – the viewing public – swing away at it. The question posed has been should we dedicate a separate set of servers for the distributed cache (DC) service in SharePoint 2013. To get right to the point, in my opinion, yes you should. 

I’ll state up front that this has been something of a turn from my original ideals before the product was released. I had intended originally to co-locate the DC service on WFE machines. As I continued to use the product and work with other folks that had deployed it, I began to see more cases where the DC service seemed to periodically perform “flaky”. I experienced this myself multiple times in multiple farms, and actually spent a fair amount of time trying to troubleshoot the issue, with fairly limited success. What I came to find in my own environments is that where I had moved the DC service onto its own dedicated servers, those “flaky” issues disappeared.

Having my own anecdotal evidence in hand then, a few of us started asking around to try and get some thoughts from other folks on why this might be happening. Eric F. ended up providing us with a really great explanation of why you might see “flaky” or inconsistent behavior with the DC service when it’s co-located with other services, so I’ll paraphrase his comments here:

  • We need 1 to 2ms response times. It’s going to struggle to deliver such fast response times if it’s sharing the server with other apps that can occupy the CPU at inopportune moments.
  • The job of the DC service is to cache stuff for you so it wants to grab a bunch of memory and hold onto it. But to deliver great performance (see bullet #1), it needs to avoid swapping memory pages out to disk; if the machine runs low on memory it has to evict content from its cache. When the DC service is co-located it has to live with other apps that have their own pattern of memory usage. Those patterns will have periods where they consume a lot of memory, and then periods where (either due to GC, IIS restart, or their own cleanup) shrink back down. That’s difficult for the DC service to manage because whenever the memory usage spikes it has to empty its caches.

So based on my own experiences and the great explanation for why we would see inconsistent behavior with DC services, that’s why I now recommend putting the DC services on their own dedicated set of servers. Someone astutely asked “well why can’t I just put a lot more RAM and CPU on my WFEs and co-locate”? Well you can, but there are couple things you need to consider. First, given the explanation above, there’s no guarantee of some magic “limit” or “boundary” where you can 100% ensure that DC services will not be impacted. Second, by the time you add “a lot more” RAM and CPU on a WFE, chances are it would have been more effective to take that extra capacity and just carve out a 2 or 3 additional virtual images and have them host the DC service. 

Yes, there are some extra costs beyond that, like software licensing and the operations of those servers. However, there’s also a cost if you get stuck trying to troubleshoot results that are inconsistent and nearly impossible to reproduce. There’s also a cost if your users lose confidence in the stability of the farm because of random issues caused by having features flake out if the DC services are not working as needed. Ultimately you’ll need to decide what’s best for you, your budget, and your customers. For me though, I recommend hosting the DC services on a set of dedicated servers.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Question: I have random performance problems reported by users. What technique would you recommend for isolating the source of the problem? It could be the DC or any number of factors. Thanks

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hi @Jason, I think the most common "flakiness" is that you will not see anything in your consolidated newsfeeds.  Instead you'll get messages like "we're still working on getting this information" or whatever, when really the info should be there.  Users get annoyed when they find their newsfeed info missing.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    thanks for sharing.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hi Steve, I understand the benefits of dedicating one or more servers to distributed cache and for large farms this makes sense to me and I'm on board for adding more servers in large farms. What advice is there for smaller farms (say 4 servers or less) that cannot dedicate a whole other server for only DC? Is DC safe for use running on a server that has other roles? From your post it sounds like it is not. What are the side effects or symptoms of of the "flaky" issues? Please let me know. Thank you, Jason

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2013
    Steven, thanks for sharing your info and knowledge on this young technique that's new for all us SP guys. You mention to have a dedicated DC server for your SP farm. But would you run only the DC service on a SP server or perhaps combine it with some APP server roles?

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2014
    You will also see an increase in performance after installing AppFabric 1.1 updates for SharePoint

  • Anonymous
    January 27, 2014
    There's a good explanation here of how AppFabric memory management works and why simply adding more memory to a WFE server could actually make performance worse not better :Windows Server AppFabric Memory Consumption Behaviorhttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/2787717

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2014
    Are the same issues expected in a internet presence site environment?( i.e. The SharePoint farm is serving an internet facing web site with anonymous access). There is medium load on the farm with limited authoring.
    That's why I would think of co-location for DC.

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 03, 2014
    This is really a great thing about the dedicated server. I always appreciate your thoughts of sharing on blogs. Please always keep doing it.

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  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2014
    Dedicated servers are really very beneficial for every business for their growth. This is a very nice idea to go with the dedicated servers.

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  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2014
    Budget is the main constraint in the dedicated server, But if your plan is big then dedicated server should be your first choice.

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