I didn't get to Cedar Point's media event this year (I have something of a proximity problem), but we did fire up our live blog for it. Walt posted photos and video from the event in real-time, which was a lot of fun to watch. I wrote about creating the little app last year.
I didn't go completely nuts this year with it on a bunch of virtual hardware that I didn't need, but it did once again run in Azure. This time it was on Azure Web Sites, and the performance was pretty great. It only peaked at 50 concurrent SignalR connections, but of course it never broke a sweat. Response times were consistently under 100 ms from this end of the country.
It's a lot of fun to build little things like this now and then with performance in mind. There's something satisfying about getting even simple things to run very quickly, and part of that is just the joy of learning where improvement is possible. I've been fortunate to work on some giant things that push insane traffic (MSDN forums), and those really force you to think about how to make things simple and efficient.
PointBuzz has been running on Azure for almost two weeks, and I'm going to try to get CoasterBuzz there next. I'm hoping that this is the last month I ever pay for a physical dedicated server.
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