Monitoring the physical memory of a server running Internet Information Server involves measuring the size of the areas in physical memory used by IIS and assuring that enough space is available to contain the elements Internet Information Server needs to store. The space should be sufficient for normal operation and for sporadic peaks in demand.
The Windows NT virtual memory system is designed to be self-tuning. The Virtual Memory Manager and Cache Manager adjust the size of the file system cache, the working sets of processes, the paged and nonpaged memory pools, and the paging files on disk to produce the most efficient use of available physical memory. Similarly, the IIS service regulates the size of the IIS Object Cache. Therefore, the primary purpose of monitoring memory in a Windows NT server running Internet Information Server is to make sure that the server has enough physical memory, not to adjust the size of each memory component as might be the case with other operating systems.