Performance and Scaling Enhancements

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

Future growth in the utilization of your Web sites and applications requires increased performance and scalability of Web servers. By increasing the speed at which HTTP requests can be processed and by allowing more applications and sites to run on one Web server, the number of Web servers that you need to host a site is reduced. The following are a few of the performance improvements included in worker process isolation mode.

You can configure all of the worker processes in an application pool to have affinity with specific processors in a multiprocessor or server. Processor affinity allows the worker processes to take advantage of more frequent processor caching (Level 1 or Level 2).

You can configure application pools to have worker processes request a shutdown if they are idle for a certain amount of time. This can free unused resources for other active worker processes. New worker processes are then started only when they are needed.

You can configure an application pool to have more than one worker process servicing client connections, also known as a Web garden. Because there are multiple worker processes, the incoming client connections are distributed across the worker processes and throughput is not constrained by a single worker process.

You can isolate Web sites and applications without incurring a performance penalty.