Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Noteworthy Advanced Settings

It's beyond the scope of this book to detail every available setting because they can be found in the Microsoft Help and in the description section within IIS Manager. But there are some settings that have noteworthy significance.

Bitness

Historically, Windows Server 2003, Service Pack 1 offered support in IIS 6.0 to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit Windows. This way you could have 64-bit Windows and set IIS to run in 32-bit mode to run applications that weren't compatible with 64-bit. There was one major limitation with this option in IIS 6.0. You had to make this setting at the global level for all of IIS. You could not have some sites on the same server run 32-bit while others ran 64-bit.

Starting with IIS 7.0, IIS now supports different bit settings per application pool. You can set some application pools to run 32-bit and others 64-bit. The operating system must be 64-bit to support both bitness modes, and a 32-bit version of Windows can only support 32-bit application pools. This property does not show up in IIS Manager on a 32-bit version of Windows.

If you are running a 64-bit version of Windows, the Advanced Settings for the application pool has a property called Enable 32-Bit Applications which can be set to true.

You can change this with AppCmd.exe by using the following:

appcmd.exe set apppool "AppPool1" 
—enable32BitAppOnWin64:true

CPU Limits

The CPU limit is one of the easiest settings to misunderstand. At first glance, it would appear ...