Everyone Else Supports Web Farms -- Why Not Telerik AJAX Upload?

[Cory]

ASP.Net AJAX: Upload is rapidly becoming obsolete.

I have stopped recommending this product to clients and for our own internal projects.

Unless there are plans (real serious plans) to add Web Farm and Load Balancing support to ASP.Net AJAX: Upload by enabling a database or shared file system location for buffering and progress management, I will be abandoning ASP.Net AJAX: Upload.

I have spoken to a number of other users who are in the same boat.  The long-term problem we face is what to do with our Telerik subscriptions after we have stopped using the primary components. 

Replacing things like drop-downs with Open Source and paying for a one-component (but high quality) Upload widget seems like a better option.

Thoughts?  Does Telerik have enough resources to produce high quality individual control feature sets?  Or is the goal many pretty components with so-so features?

[Atanas Korchev]

Hi Cory,

Let me explain how RadUpload works under the hood.

1. RadUpload renders <input type="file" /> which is the default HTML element for file uploading
2. That <input type="file" /> is made invisible so a skin can be applied
3. The actual file uploading is performed by the browser itself and the ASP.NET runtime
4. The progress monitoring is performed by two components - http module and http handler.
5. The module hooks to the BeginRequest event and simply counts the bytes that are uploaded
6. The progress area control is polling the http handler to obtain progress data

RadUpload can automatically store the uploaded files at a specified location. We also have examples how to upload files to a database. Having said that I am not sure why RadUpload is not meeting your requirements. Could you please elaborate where our product fails in your scenario? I can confirm that we have customers using RadUpload in web farms with load balancing support. One of those customers is Telerik.com itself.

Looking forward to your reply,
Atanas Korchev
the Telerik team

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[Christopher Bishop]

Cory,
I am really not clear on this as well, I use radUpload and the telerik upload via silverlight as well in a web farm (load balanced via hardware) and clustered sql servers. I have not experienced anything like what you are talking about?

I have a nas that is used for all the attachments which every web server has a mapped path and where all uploads are processed, i NEVER stick binary data in my database but pointers to the actual file, but if you are in a webFarm situtation then I am assuming you are using some central point like sql or state server for your session state yes?

If you could be a little more specific that would be super...

Christopher

[p]

I think what he is trying to say is that the progress bar for uploads is not working in a non sticky web farm scenario...
because of  step #5 could happen one server and step #6 could happen on a different server.

I am trying to find out if that is still a problem.

[Mark]

My experience with a web farm (Azure Cloud) is that since it isn't sticky, each chunk of file it uploads alternates from server to server.  Then when the final chunk is uploaded, that server only has part of the file.  The file that then gets written to disk is the right length, but it has huge chunks of the file that are all 0's.  I assume this is the chunks that went to another server.  I too won't be using RadUpload on most of our apps unless there is a resolution to this.

Mark

[Cory]

You are correct, RadUpload will not work with modern web hosting or cloud hosting systems.

RadUpload is essentially worthless for 99% of the world's Enterprise web applications.

I'm not sure if anyone (hello?) is using a single server in the real world?

[Mark]

We do use RadUpload on another web app, but it has a sticky load balancer, so it works 99.99% of the time.  But for anything on the Cloud (which, hello, is the future) RadUpload won't work.

[p]

I have no problem with Telerik's Radupload tool. I use it in a load balanced non sticky environment.
The only think that does not work right now(or atleast it didnt work "back then") is the rad progress bar for rad upload. I am pretty sure they will fix it soon by providing an option to store the information in the session.

[Ross Presser]

This has been an issue since at least 2007 and Telerik shows no sign of fixing it.

[Dimitar Terziev]

Hi,

In general the RadUpload could be used in load balance environment, could you clarify what exactly is the experienced problem with our control? In case you refer to the RadProgressArea, this is a limitation of the control and  it's clearly stated in the following help article here.

Greetings,
Dimitar Terziev
the Telerik team

[Ross Presser]

It's a limitation NOT shared by any of your competitor's equivalents to RadProgressArea.

[Genady Sergeev]

Hello Ross,

Indeed this is true, however, due to design limitations we didn't manage to provide WebFarm support in the context of RadUpload. The good news, however, are that for this reason we have a new component called RadAsyncUpload that supports progress monitoring in web farm scenarios as well as many other features. I suggest that you give it a first look here.

Regards,
Genady Sergeev
the Telerik team