<p>The default <strong>asp.net</strong> membership provider uses a <code>.mdf</code> sql server database file in the <code>app_code</code> database.<br>
How scalable is this in terms of calling a flat file database instead of running it in a standard sql environment?<br>
Is this recommended only for small/medium traffic sites?  </p>

[{'answer_id': 55760, 'author': 'Josef', 'author_id': 5581, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5581', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': "<p>It's a reasonable trade off for any site that can run on one server. It's fairly reasonable for small to medium traffic sites.</p>\n\n<p>When you grow to a point of a web farm, then you'll be better off with a separate server. Also, depending on how database dependent your application is, you may find better performance handing off SQL queries to a totally different server/processor to handle the database side.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 55917, 'author': 'csmba', 'author_id': 350, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/350', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>I wouldn\'t recommend this for anything but a "learning" project.</p>\n\n<p>For any real application, regardless of size, you don\'t know what type of "next feature" you will add. You want to have a real independent database in which you can delegate functionality to, in which you can set jobs to run independently, sit on a different HD, maybe splitting it into a different VM?  </p>\n\n<p>You can use SQL Express and still be "free\', and it is better to do this seperation before the site grows and the DB is harder to move.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/55755', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/203653/']