Writing the In-Memory Metabase and Schema to Disk

  • Article

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

The metabase is written to disk either when MetaBase.xml is edited directly and manually saved to disk, or when the in-memory metabase is saved to disk.

Important

MetaBase.xml can be edited by hand and saved to disk only when edit-while-running is enabled or when the IIS Admin service is stopped before the MetaBase.xml file is edited and saved.

The in-memory metabase is written to disk only under the following circumstances:

  • When the IIS Admin service is stopped, and there are changes pending in the in-memory metabase.

  • The in-memory metabase is written to disk 60 seconds after a change is made to the metabase; however, if more than 30 changes occur during those 60 seconds, the write-to-disk event is postponed for another 60 seconds. The in-memory metabase write-to-disk event is postponed a maximum of five times, after which it is written to disk.

  • When saved programmatically, as when using a resource such as ADSI, WMI, or ABO.

Figure 4.4 and the following discussion describe how the in-memory metabase is written to disk. The verification checks can influence how IIS saves the in-memory metabase to disk, as illustrated by the possible scenarios.