Difference Between Web Farm and Web Garden

Introduction

Web Farms and Web Garden are very common terminology for any production deployment. Though these terms looks same but the things are totally different. Many beginners very confused with these two terms. Here I am giving the basic difference between the Web Farm and Web Garden.

Web Farm

After developing our asp.net web application we host it on IIS Server.  Now one standalone server is sufficient to process ASP.NET Request and response for a small web sites but when the site comes for big organization where there an millions of daily user hits then we need to host the sites on multiple Server. This is called web farms. Where single site hosted on multiple IIS Server and they are  running behind the Load Balancer.

Fig : General Web Farm Architecture

This is the most common scenarios for any web based production environment. Where Client will hit an Virtual IP ( vIP) . Which is the IP address of Load Balancer. When Load balancer received the request based on the server load it will redirect the request to particular Server.

Web Garden

All IIS Request process by worker process ( w3wp.exe). By default each and every application pool contain single worker process. But An application pool with multiple worker process is called Web Garden.   Many worker processes with same Application Pool can sometimes provide better throughput performance and application response time. And Each Worker Process Should have there own Thread and Own Memory space.

There are some Certain Restriction to use Web Garden with your web application. If we use Session Mode to "in proc", our application will not work correctly because session will be handled by different Worker Process. For Avoid this Type of problem we should have to use Session Mode "out proc" and we can use "Session State Server" or "SQL-Server Session State".