UNC on IIS7 - time for a refresher course!

Recently we started an effort to again look at the centralized content and configuration story and see where we can improve for IIS7.  It was a bit amazing to me that some people had not yet read the whitepaper from Brett Hill and myself on remote content and configuration!  :)  And sadly didn't understand the value of the "GetLastModified" based caching algorithm for hosters.  Anyway, they will be reading the paper and I'll be giving a quiz afterwards to check.  :)

Typically when scaling out a web server for lots of sites, performance isn't the critical piece (sometimes caching is off completely), but TCO per site and per box is.  This is where using the alternative caching method of the GetLastModified date in our static file and asp page caching systems comes into play.  As the whitepaper goes into detail about, this algorithm may use more internal network bandwidth, but it doesn't use up NonPaged Pool (memory) on the webserver or file server to maintain the change notifications.  This allows the machines to have a broader set of content and still maintian some performance characteristics. 

The unfortunate part of this, is that only static files and asp content are covered by this caching algorithm, for FPSE and asp.net and 3rd party handlers; we don't have an easy way to expose this caching system.  Perhaps in a future version of IIS this will occur. 

If you haven't read the whitepaper and want to see your web server scale better where you have your content centralized, please read this whitepaper ... we'd love to get your feedback. 

Here is the link:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/webapp/iis/remstorg.mspx

2 Comments

  • I've seen this link on several places, however, it seems to get redirected to the home: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/windowsserver/2003/default.aspx


    Could you kindly correct the link, I would actually like to read the whitepaper :)

  • Unfortunately, due to some Technet reshuffling, this article was somehow lost (not a good story). Good news though, it is back thanks to our great documentation team manager! The new location for this document is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd296641.aspx

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