A Former Microsoft IIS PM

I recently received from a customer the following question:

NOTE:  IF NOT FAMILIAR WITH IISCERTDEPLOY.VBS, REVIEW THE FOLLOWING WEBCAST IN THE IIS WEBCAST SERIES TO UNDERSTAND WHY YOU SHOULD BE USING IT.

Hey all~

Later on, I will show you a pretty cool way to make that UBR file much easier for  you non-JavaScript fans.  But, this should give you the "out of the box" experience for WCAT.

WCAT Client

As we mentioned, clients are nothing more than just a "dummy" doing what the "master" (wcctl.exe) tells it what to do.  Thus, all the requests that this client will make are completely dependent on the UBR settings.

Wcclient isn't fancy, just a .exe that you must call to start a client.  Based on your UBR configuration, the client will "simulate" a number of clients like setting the Client Threads to 80 equals 80 virtual clients.

The beauty of WCAT is that it can simulate a large number of clients and create very quick web traffic against your web server.  The downside is it doesn't have any built-in logic to determine what constitutues a "complete" request such as requests for images, htm, css's, and many other files that make up a typical web request.  See HTTP RFC for more details...

Using Log Parser to Generate a UBR File

Knowing what we know above, we first think "sheesh, if it can't re-create load already hitting my application then it is useless."  I would agree if it wasn't for a very cool tool called Log Parser (all you roadshow attendees you should be very familiar with this awesome tool!) that allows Log Parser to read your IIS Log Files and re-create that traffic against your server.  Did we just say that you can easily "re-create" your traffic?  You betcha... and free!

Log Parser:  Get The Coolness Here

To understand how to do this, I suggest that you review the following:

“We would like to use Web Gardens for load-balancing and we want to know the caveats to using this feature?”

Introduction

In the past 2 weeks, I delivered a 2–part series on the usefulness, downsides of SCW, and overall usage of the tool.  In part I, I discussed more details on how the tool works from installation to the creation of policies as well as applying those policies.

I recently got emailed a question about where to begin troubleshooting a problem relating to IIS 5.1.  IIS 5.1 shipped as part of Windows XP Professional and is very similar to the Windows 2000 Professional release of IIS (also called IIS 5.0).  Here was the question: