Scalability Features in Windows Server 2003
Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 with SP1
This section describes features in Windows Server 2003 that can improve the scalability of your application server.
Important
Do not enable features described here on a production server before you establish a performance baseline in a test environment. If enabling any of these features degrades performance, continue testing or disable the feature and return your server to the pre-change configuration.
Kernel-mode driver
Windows Server 2003 introduces a new kernel-mode driver, HTTP.sys, for HTTP parsing and caching. IIS 6.0 is built on top of HTTP.sys. HTTP.sys is specifically tuned to increase Web server throughput by directly processing requests in the kernel (in specific circumstances) or by efficiently routing requests to user-mode worker processes. The combination of kernel request processing and efficient user-mode routing have dramatically improved how IIS 6.0 scales and performs. For more information about HTTP.sys, see IIS 6.0 Architecture.
64-bit support
The complete Windows Server 2003 code base is compiled for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Organizations that need highly scalable applications can take advantage of an operating system that runs — and is supported — on these two platforms.
WSRM
Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM) is a feature of Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition and Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition.
With WSRM, you can control how CPU and memory resources are allocated to applications, services, and processes. Managing resources in this way improves system performance and reduces the chance that applications, services, or processes will interfere with the rest of the system; it also creates a more consistent and predictable experience for users of applications and services running on the computer.
WSRM can be installed from the Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition or Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition operating system CD. For more information about WSRM, see Help in the WSRM snap-in.
DFS
Distributed File System (DFS) unifies files on different computers into a single namespace, making it easy to build a single, hierarchical view of multiple file servers and file server shares on a network. To use DFS as the file system for IIS, select the root for the Web site as a DFS root. You can then move resources within a DFS tree without affecting any HTML links. For more information about DFS, see Distributed File System and File Replication Services.
FRS
The File Replication service (FRS) provides multimaster file replication for designated directory trees between designated servers running Windows Server 2003. The designated directory trees must be on disk partitions formatted with the version of the NTFS file system used with Windows Server 2003. FRS must be used with DFS. DFS uses FRS to automatically synchronize content between assigned replicas. The combination of DFS and FRS can also work with the Active Directory® directory service to automatically synchronize the content of system volume information across domain controllers. For more information about FRS, see Distributed File System and File Replication Services.