Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Understanding the w3wp.exe Process

Each application pool runs in its own worker process within the operating system so that there is complete separation between application pools. This also allows a specific user identity to be assigned to each worker process for security reasons.

The w3wp.exe worker process runs in user-mode and processes requests for content for each application pool.

Figure 8.4 shows two w3wp.exe worker processes, one for each of two application pools. The web pages are executed within these processes.

Note

There are no hard limits on the amount of application pools that can run on a single server. IIS can handle hundreds of running application pools and thousands of application pools, assuming that not all of them will be running at once. Each application pool has some memory and potentially CPU overhead that together will eventually tax the server beyond an acceptable level. Mileage will vary depending on hardware and the types of sites on the server. An application pool running a static webpage has about 3 MB of memory overhead, while one running a simple ASP.NET page has a base of 10 MB of memory overhead (give or take a couple of megabytes). You can use these general numbers to determine how much additional overhead is generated by separating sites into their own application pools. RAM is cheap so, when in doubt, separate them out.

Figure 8.4