Professional IIS 7.0

Chapter 19. Monitoring and Performance Tuning

After covering operations processes in the previous chapter, it's time to talk about the technical changes that you can make to improve performance and ensure the uptime of your web site. In this chapter, you will learn how to track the status of the IIS services and how to make performance improvements to your web server.

The value to your business of monitoring computer systems is widely accepted by professional organizations. To this end, monitoring tools automate the capture and reporting of performance data. Using a monitoring tool installed on your web server, you can track the history and status of the applications and web-site engines and track the state of operating system services, including IIS. Simply put, monitoring is about collecting data, and optimizing is about using that data to build the best configuration.

Administrators are often unable to act on the data they collect. With performance data, you can establish patterns that will define peak periods of activity, audit capacity, build detailed upgrade plans, and learn how all the parts of your system interact. The adjustments you make to your web site and servers to improve performance are the subject of the later sections of this chapter. The goal of this chapter is to help you tune your system in the process of maximizing performance across the entire system.

Monitoring Web Sites

When you install IIS 7.0, you get a service with default settings designed for reliability, ...