Performance Tuning

Updated: June 30, 2006

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

Web server administrators often monitor their Web servers to create a performance baseline. A performance baseline is a collection of data that indicates how the servers are performing when everything is running smoothly. Before making changes to their servers in a production environment, administrators tune their servers in a test environment to achieve the established performance baseline. By tuning their servers, Web server administrators maximize the Web server's ability to handle HTTP requests and minimize Web application response times, which create a better experience for clients accessing their Web servers.

In This Section

This section includes the following information:

Using HTTP Compression: Describes how to improve performance between client computers and servers by reducing file sizes before the files are sent to the client computer. Reducing the file size as described here is referred to as compression.
Enabling HTTP Keep-Alives: Describes how to use HTTP Keep-Alive requests to maintain an open connection.
Limiting Connections: Describes how to set limits on the number of connections to a Web server.
Setting Connection Timeouts: Describes how to set connection time-out values on a Web server.
Throttling Bandwidth: Describes how to change the bandwidth used by a Web server and individual Web sites.
Setting the IIS Object Cache Time Period: Describes how to set the IIS object cache time period.
Maximizing Data Throughput for Network Applications: Describes how to maximizing data throughput for network applications.
Setting the SSL Cache Time-out Interval: Describes how to set the SSL cache time-out interval.
Measuring Load Time for a Web Page: Describes how to measure load time for a Web page.
Enabling CPU Monitoring in IIS 6.0: Describes how to monitor and stop problematic applications.
Configuring Application Pool Queue-Length Limits: Describes how to limit the number of requests IIS stores in any application pool queue so the requests do not grow to such a large size as to exhaust server resources.
Scalability: Provides information and links to detailed resources about scalability.
Configuring Last-Modified Caching: Describes how to configure last-modified caching.
Configuring ASP Change-Notification Caching: Describes how to configure ASP change-notification caching.

Related Sections

For more information about each of the performance features described in this section and for a more detailed introduction into what it means to monitor and tune an IIS Web server, see Optimizing IIS 6.0 Performance.
For more information about performance tuning, how to work with counters, how to create and configure counters, trace logs, or alerts, and a list of best practices; see "Monitoring Performance" in Help and Support Center for Windows Server 2003.
For information about monitoring the performance of your ASP.NET applications, see Overview of ASP.NET Performance Monitoring.
For more information about the Web Capacity Analysis Tool for performance testing and monitoring, download the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools and their accompanying documentation.