Internet Information Server is designed to support millions of connections. In fact, the internal default for the maximum number of simultaneous connections is 2 million connections. (This default is overriden by the Internet Service Manager, but administrators can change it.) Nonetheless, large numbers of simultaneous connections can overload the processors.
It is important to monitor connections on your Internet Information Server. In particular, it is important to determine how your server responds when it is managing different numbers of connections. When you have collected data on connection trends, you can associate data about general server performance with the number of connections being served.
This section discusses why connections have performance overhead, how you can use Performance Monitor and other tools to measure the overhead, and how to interpret the data you gather.