What is the difference between Web Farm and Web Garden?

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/114910/What-is-the-difference-between-Web-Farm-and-Web-Ga

Clients request for resources and IIS process the request and send back to clients. If you want to know more details on How IIS Processes the request, please read one of my articles about “How IIS Process ASP.NET Request?”.

Web Farm

This is the case where you have only one web server and multiple clients requesting for resources from the same server.

But when are is huge amount of incoming traffic for your web sites, one standalone server is not sufficient to process the request.

You may need to use multiple servers to host the application and divide the traffic among them.

This is called “Web Farm”. So when you are hosting your single web site on multiple web servers over load balancer is called “Web Farm”.

The below diagram shows the overall representation of Web Farms.

In general web farm architecture, a single application is hosted on multiple IIS Server and those are connected with the VIP (Virtual IP) with Load Balancer.

Load Balancer IPs are exposed to external world to access.

So whenever some request will come to server from clients, it will first hit the Load Balancer, then based on the traffic on each server, LB distributes the request to the corresponding web server.

These web servers may share the same DB server or may be they can use a replicated server in the back end.

So, in a single statement, when we host a web application over multiple web servers to distribute the load among them, it is called Web Farm.

Web Garden

Now, let’s have a look at what is Web Garden? Both the terms sound the same, but they are totally different from each other.

Before starting with Web Garden, I hope you have a fundamental idea of what an Application Pool is and what a Worker Process is.

If you have already read the article, “How IIS Processes ASP.NET Request ?”, then I can expect that you now have a good idea about both of them.

Just to recall, when we are talking about requesting processing within IIS, Worker Process (w3wp.exe) takes care of all of these.

Worker Process runs the ASP.NET application in IIS.

All the ASP.NET functionality inside IIS runs under the scope of worker process.

Worker Process is responsible for handling all kinds of request, response, session data, cache data.

Application Pool is the container of worker process.

Application pool is used to separate sets of IIS worker processes and enables a better security, reliability, and availability for any web application.

Now, by default, each and every Application pool contains a single worker process.

Application which contains the multiple worker process is called “Web Garden”.

Below is the typical diagram for a web garden application.

In the above diagram, you can see one of the applications containing the multiple worker processes, which is now a web garden.

So, a Web application hosted on multiple servers and access based on the load on servers is called Web Farms and when a single application pool contains multiple Worker processes, it is called a web garden.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2151251/asp-net-web-garden-how-many-worker-processes-do-i-need

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5583470/does-a-webapplication-run-faster-when-maximum-worker-processes-is-more-than-one

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2147578/asp-net-session-state-and-multiple-worker-processes

I have flowers... should I get a Web Garden?

Configuring a Web Farm Using IIS Shared Configuration