Ask the Windows 2000 Dev Team

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Every other week we put your How-Come-You-Did-That questions to the Windows 2000 development team. Submit your questions here.

Active Directory, Process Throttling with IIS, Control Web-Server Bandwidth

Q: I don't think my company can start with Active Directory right away. Why should we bother with Windows 2000 now?

**A:**For starters, you can begin your Active Directory domain planning. If you're running a Windows NT 4.0 domain, you might want to revisit your current structure and see if it makes sense in light of the hierarchical domain structure of Windows 2000 domains. There are lots of white papers on this topic on TechNet. You can also start installing Windows 2000 standalone (member) servers as File servers, Web servers, Application servers, and Networking servers. As a starting point for these installations, use the shortcut Configure Your Server under Administrative Tools in the Control Panel.

Q: OK, then let's start with Web servers. Can I still control the network bandwidth used by Internet Information Server (IIS) on a particular server?

A: Yes, you can set it either at the computer level or at the Web-site level. You can also enable process throttling for out-of-process applications so that no one application can dominate processing time on a server. Limiting access to the CPU is useful if you host multiple sites on one computer and you are concerned that out-of-process applications on one site will use all of the CPU capacity — thereby preventing other sites from using it. You can either log an event when an application exceeds the limit (for example, 10 percent of the processing time), or you can enforce the limit.

Q: Process throttling would give our IT department a little more control over individual Internet and intranet applications. What do you do to figure out when you need process throttling?

A: Full details about process throttling are included in the Internet Information Server documentation for both Beta 3 and Release Candidate 1 of Windows 2000. However, before you decide to enforce process throttling, you should at least:

  • Use System Monitor to examine both the %-Processor Time counter in the Processor object, and the specific instance counters for Maximum CGI Requests and Total CGI Requests in the Web Service object.

  • Enable process accounting so that the Job object counter reports are included in IIS logs.

  • Examine the DLLHOST object counters to determine the number of out-of-process WAM and ISAPI requests.