Use Web Garden to simulate Web Farm session issues?

Question

I just stumbled across the concept of a "Web Garden" in an IIS App Pool. That is, when more than one process serves the same webpage. From what I understand, this means ASP.NET InProc sessions have the same problems as a web farm.

My question is, assuming your production environment is a web farm but your development/test environment is not, would it be helpful to set up a "Web Garden" in dev/test? I'm thinking this would help catch any multi-process/server issues early on, or at least confirm that everything works as expected.

Answer 1

I have toyed with this idea in the past, it can be helpful, but I would say it still isn't ideal. To get the best test scenario you want to simply be on similar hardware to that of your production site.

Barring that though, Web Gardening will help you with SOME items and issue identification depending on how you need to work with it.

Our biggest issue with it is that we have some items that truly need to know what server they are on, and with gardening, you don't have that distinction at the application level.