Windows 2000 Performance Guide

Performance Management

At the beginning of this chapter, we took a detailed look at the processing of an HTTP GETrequest by IIS, and saw that IIS makes use of most of the underlying resources of the system in processing that request. Now, to gain a better understanding of how to monitor the impact of IIS on those resources, detect bottlenecks, and perform capacity planning of the server, we look closely at how IIS utilizes those underlying resources. For each major resource—the CPU, memory, disk subsystem, and network—we look at how the resource is utilized by IIS, sources that provide us with information on how the resource is utilized, and methods of dealing with a potential bottleneck at that resource.

Managing the CPU

In Chapter 3, we took an in-depth look at how the processor is utilized by the Windows 2000 operating system and the applications running on it, how you can monitor that utilization, and what you can do to improve the performance of a system with a CPU bottleneck. Here, we look at how IIS utilizes the CPU in servicing its requests.

Connection requests

IIS is basically a passive application that waits for requests from its clients to put it to work. A request arrives over the network when a client submits an HTTP request for a resource. At that point, a TCP connection is established between the client and the server so that the request and response can flow between them. So for every connection request that arrives over the network, the CPU needs to process the packet ...