Windows 2000 Performance Guide

Sources of Information

A number of sources of information can assist you in tuning and performing capacity planning of IIS. As usual, the System Monitor has lots of metrics, some specific to IIS, and some of other resources that are critical in a high-performance IIS configuration. The log files generated by the server also provide valuable input on the workload imposed on your system. Another source of information is the IIS Metabase. Although the information stored in the Metabase is not directly related to performance, it contains crucial configuration parameters for IIS that can be used for tuning purposes. These sources provide loads of information for understanding the workload and the operation of your application server. If you understand the characteristics of the requests processed by IIS and know how the response time is allocated across the resources utilized in processing a request, you have won half the battle of tuning the server’s performance and in planning its capacity.

System Monitor Metrics

IIS uses all the underlying resources of the server in providing its service. Therefore, to understand its performance you need to look at a variety of objects, such as the Processor object and the Physical Disk object. Later, as we evaluate the impact of IIS on basic system resources, we point you toward counters from other objects that become relevant. Here, we describe only the Performance objects made available to the System Monitor after IIS 5.0 is installed and that ...