Monitoring and Tuning Your Server

Using This Section

This section suggests several approaches to monitoring and improving the performance of a site running Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 with Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server or Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Advanced Server. It is intended as a technical guide for administrators, but should be useful for anyone with one or more servers running IIS 5.0. This section discusses the following topics:

Memory Memory is discussed first because memory shortages often manifest themselves as poor performance in other components, especially processors and disks. It is important to rule out a memory shortage before investigating other components.
This section presents an overview of some techniques for determining whether a computer has adequate physical memory to be an efficient Internet server. It discusses how IIS 5.0 uses physical memory, including the IIS Object Cache, IIS Template Cache, and IIS Script Engine Cache, as well as the operating system’s File System Cache, In addition, it includes suggestions for tuning some server parameters to improve memory use. It also covers Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) sockets.
Preventing Processor Bottlenecks This section presents a brief discussion of tools and strategies for monitoring processor use in single-processor and multiple-processor computers running IIS 5.0, and for preventing the processor from becoming a system bottleneck. It provides information about the role of the processor in servicing client connections and requests, and it includes tips on tuning in order to balance processor load.
Network I/O This section offers some techniques for measuring how much data a network configuration is able to transmit during periods of average and peak use. It includes some suggestions for capacity planning based on the number of files and connections the server is expected to handle.
Web Applications Applications can be responsible for poor performance and inefficient processor and memory use. This section builds on the monitoring techniques discussed in the memory and processor sections. It suggests some ways to monitor the basic aspects of application performance, and explains why some applications perform better than others on IIS 5.0. It also includes some suggestions for optimizing your Web applications, and for mitigating the effects of poor application performance.
Monitoring Security Overhead This section presents a brief discussion of some techniques for monitoring the performance overhead associated with some common security strategies, such as integrated Windows authentication and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.
Tools This section is a short list of some monitoring and performance-testing tools that you can use with Windows 2000 Server and IIS 5.0.