Microsoft® IIS 6.0 Administrator's Pocket Consultant

Tuning Web Server Performance

Now that you know how to monitor your Web servers, let’s look at how you can tune the operating system and hardware performance. The areas I’ll examine are the following:

• Memory usage and caching

• Processor utilization

• Disk I/O

• Network bandwidth and connectivity

Monitoring and Tuning Memory Usage

Memory is often the source of performance problems, and you should always rule out memory problems before examining other areas of the system. One of the key reasons memory can be such a problem is that the IIS file cache is configured to use up to half of the available system memory by default. This means that on a system with 512 MB of RAM, the IIS file cache could use as much as 256 MB of memory. (Of course, the amount of memory ...