Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 10: Performance Monitoring in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 259
■ Creating a new application pool uses more memory, but it helps the stability of
the portal.
■ If you share one application pool among many portals, you have saved memory
space at the cost of cascading failure to other portals if the application pool
doesn’t function properly.
It is essential that you properly configure the application pool to ensure the
health and reliability of an Active Server Pages (ASP) .NET application. All the relevant
settings are found on the application pool property sheet.
IIS 6.0 distinguishes between proactive and reactive recycling. IIS performs
proactive recycling for known conditions and reactive recycling for unknown or
dynamic conditions. For proactive recycling, IIS 6.0 checks the elapsed time, the
number of requests completed, the scheduled time, and the amount of memory
used. By default, events are only logged in the application event log if the recycling
occurs based on the memory limit trigger.
Table 10-9 describes the available IIS 6.0 application pool settings, which are
accessible through the IIS MMC snap-in.
Table 10-9 Application Pool Settings for IIS 6.0
Setting Description
Idle timeout Controls whether IIS shuts down idle worker processes. Worker
processes serving the application pool are shut down after being
idle for the specified amount of time.
Request queue limit Controls the size of the request queue. This setting prevents large
numbers of requests from queuing up and overloading the Web
server.
CPU monitoring Specifies what action is to be taken if a CPU usage threshold is
reached.
Web garden Controls the number of worker processes for the application pool.
Enable pinging Specifies how often the Web Administration Service (WAS) pings
each worker process in the application pool to detect its status.
Enable rapid fail
protection
Configures IIS to remove the application pool from service if a
specified number of crashes occur within the specified time period.
If a worker process is removed from service, HTTP.sys responds to
any incoming request with a “503 Service Unavailable” message.
Startup time limit Specifies the amount of time a process is allowed for startup before
IIS assumes that it has not started correctly and terminates it. Terminated
processes are logged in the system event log.
Shutdown time limit Tells the WAS how to cope with worker processes that hang during
shutdown. If a worker process has not shut down during the specified
time limit, it is terminated by the WAS.
ASP.NET supports two groups of performance counters: system and application.
System performance counters are exposed in Windows Server 2003 System
Monitor in the ASP.NET System performance counter object, and application performance
counters are exposed in the ASP.NET Applications performance object.