Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Performance Tuning

The mandates for tuning websites range from emergency fixes to creating more headroom for growth in an existing environment. One of the most compelling reasons for tuning performance is that your visitor base goes up, but your budget for hardware does not. By fine-tuning your application, you can get more life from your existing platform as demands go up.

The Windows platform has several tuning points—knobs or levers that you can adjust to match your resource alignment with expected traffic. This hasn't changed much with Windows Server 2012 and IIS 8. Microsoft has added the following tuning features in IIS 8:

• Application initialization—Start certain applications upon boot, ensuring a snappy response when the first request arrives.
• NUMA support—Native support Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) hardware with up to 128 processor cores, significantly moving up the bar for high-performance servers.
• CPU throttling options—New options to the IIS 7.x set for managing CPU and memory resources per application pool.

Ideally, you would conduct your first round of performance tuning before the website is released into production. That way, you can be sure that when your application goes into production, it will perform well, and you will know what that application's limitations will be before they are reached. In any event, the main configuration points that you can consider when making incremental changes are listed first in brief below, then in detail in the sections that ...