Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 Resource Kit

Managing Worker Processes and Requests

The worker process is the heart and soul of Web applications in IIS 7.0. The worker process runs in W3WP.exe and is responsible for processing application requests. In IIS 6.0, worker processes are managed by the World Wide Web Publishing Service service, but in the revamped core engine of IIS 7.0, the WAS owns worker processes.

In IIS 6.0, querying worker process information such as the Process ID (PID) of currently running worker processes and its associated application pool can be done only via the command line script Iisapp.vbs. It is also not possible in IIS 6.0 to peek inside a worker process to look at current request status. Nevertheless, if you are familiar with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), you ...