IIS includes many property settings that make it easy for you to fine-tune site performance. This topic describes properties associated with network capacity and how to adjust them. It also makes hardware recommendations based on the volume of traffic or types of sites you plan to host.
Note To increase advanced performance and capacity planning for your Web site, you may want to consider Microsoft Commerce Server. Commerce Server 2000 provides a comprehensive set of features to let developers quickly build scalable, user-centric, business-to-consumer, and business-to-business e-commerce sites. It also includes sophisticated business analysis tools to uncover business opportunities and to refine online business promotions.
This topic includes:
By throttling the connection bandwidth used by IIS, you can maintain available bandwidth for other applications, such as e-mail. Bandwidth throttling limits only the bandwidth used by static HTML files.
To determine whether you should throttle the bandwidth of IIS, use the tools described in About Performance Tuning. Keep in mind that while the total number of connection attempts in a day may give you an idea of the overall activity on your site, you also need to consider changes in the connection rate (connections per second) to see if you are having congestion problems at peak times. If you are regularly using more than 50 percent of your total connection bandwidth, you may need to consider upgrading your connection.
If you limit the number of simultaneous connections to a Web site, you can conserve resources for other services using the same connection, or other applications using the same computer. When limiting connections to an individual Web site, remember that most browsers typically make up to four simultaneous connections to download text and graphics from a page. All connection attempts beyond the connection limit are rejected. For instructions on how to limit connections, see Limiting Connections and Setting Connection Timeout.
In addition to the hardware inside your computer, the type of network connection you have can directly affect server performance. The bandwidth available to IIS is also affected by other applications running on the computer that require network bandwidth, such as e-mail.
On a moderately busy site, IIS can completely saturate a 100-Mbps Ethernet card. To prevent the server from being restricted by limited network capacity, use multiple 100-Mbps Ethernet cards. To check for network saturation, check for CPU % Utilization on both the client and the server. If neither the client or the server is restricted by the CPU capacity, then something else is the problem. Use Network Monitor, included with Windows 2000 Server, to check the Network Utilization. If the network is close to 100 percent utilized, for either the client or the server, then most likely the network is the bottleneck. An Ethernet or token-based network may have a lower over-utilized value, perhaps as low as 40 percent. For more information on accessing Network Monitor, see the Windows XP documentation.
Different brands of network cards perform differently. The performance of network cards is also affected by the drivers and driver settings used when configuring the network card. Check with the maker of your network card to see if updated drivers are available.