Monitoring and Tuning Your Server

Optimizing for Web Applications

Web applications have much higher overhead than static HTML pages. But this should not deter you from using them. By monitoring applications and estimating their overhead during periods of varying activity, you can make sure your server is prepared for the increased workload.

Here are some suggestions for optimizing your configuration for Web applications:

Upgrade Processors Web applications benefit from faster processors.
Add Processors Components called by ASP can (and should) be multithreaded, which means they can run simultaneously on multiple processors; adding a second processor to a single-processor system brings the most benefit. Even if the expense is not prohibitive, you shouldn’t use more than four processors per system at this time.
Add Memory Adding memory may help if applications are running within their own processes. (By default, ASP and ISAPI applications run within the IIS 5.0 process, but you can choose to run them within their own memory spaces.)
Defragment Your Disks If your cache performance declines over time, defragment the disk(s). Your files may have become fragmented over time.
Redesign Your Static Pages Running Web applications takes more time than serving static pages. If you are generating pages dynamically to satisfy user preferences, consider substituting as many as 10 or 20 different static variations for a single dynamically-generated page. If you are generating pages dynamically to provide frequently-updated data, consider redesigning your application so that it generates a single dynamic page on a fixed schedule and then stores that page for retrieval until the next update.
Convert CGI Scripts to Scripts in ASP Pages or to ISAPI Applications Scripts in ASP pages and ISAPI applications are optimized to run on Windows 2000. CGI applications are much less efficient, because each invocation spawns an entire process. For more information about converting CGI scripts, see Migrating a Web Server to IIS 5.0 in this book.
Convert Scripts in ASP Pages into COM Objects Scripts in ASP pages are interpreted; if a script involves one or more loops, converting it to a COM object can improve its performance by a considerable margin.

Web applications are continuing to increase in popularity, constituting an ever-larger proportion of the average Web server file base. The challenge for administrators is to preserve speed and efficiency while using them.

See the following: