@BenjaminGruenbaum This is probably not the reply you want, but... In that situation, where you lack the staffing and the capability to figure it out on your own, it's very unlikely that random people on the internet will be able to give you sufficient help. You should pay someone who knows what they're doing to help fix it for you.

@JennyD I came here to vent, I did not expect you to have "This one weird trick that would solve all your server issues, sysadmins hate it"

Thanks for trying to be helpful though :)

@BenjaminGruenbaum Oh! In that case, carry on!

New Relic reports the server responds in > 300ms and sometimes randomly requests take 6s or even more for a super simple setup :/ FML

@BenjaminGruenbaum You're welcome! My answer was at least partly a reflex because there are too many people who come in here basically saying "I don't know anything about sysadminning, you should give me step by step instructions for fixing everything without my having to think for myself at all"

@BenjaminGruenbaum yeah, intermittent problems are the hardest ones to diagnose

Yeah no, that's not me, I hate it when people do that in the StackOverflow chatroom, I'm just sharing my misfortune :D I didn't want to use Azure - I can't get any proper instrumentation to run and even getting proper logs is hard. I'm considering just running the damn thing in a VM but setting up all the replication and load balancing involved is a pain. I know I should just get a dedicated but it's too tempting to just figure the issue out because of how they manage everything for you.

Basically, paying someone who knows how to configure servers properly and getting two/three dedicated servers would have been much cheaper than what we pay to Azure for all the pain they put us through.

It's been over a year since I worked much with webservers, and I've never done Azure at all...

I'm starting to think hosting asp.net sites on ""The Cloud"" in a PaaS solution doesn't really work for anything beyond a PoC

but I get the impression that those things seem to be "one size doesn't quite fit anybody" - if you want to have something done to your specs, you need to have it custom, not mass-market.

@BenjaminGruenbaum nod

@JennyD we pay them ~$4000 a month, that's enough for paying a part time IT person $2000 a month to come twice a week and pay $2000 on servers - I think maybe we'll just do that.

@BenjaminGruenbaum that sounds sensible to me...

This is a static > 1mb file.

@BenjaminGruenbaum Wow, that's terrible

Azure ftw

@BenjaminGruenbaum ow.