Introduction

Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 offers performance gains and higher availability for your Web servers and sites. The tighter integration between the operating system and IIS allows you to tune your servers to perform much faster and more efficiently than in previous versions.

This appendix is intended for Web server administrators charged with monitoring and tuning Web sites running on Windows 2000 and IIS. Although there is some discussion of Web application testing and tuning here, the primary audience for this appendix does not include Web application developers.

This appendix discusses an approach to tuning the performance of your Web servers. It also addresses why performance tuning is important and discusses hardware, software, and testing issues involved in tuning your IIS 5.0 Web servers. Finally, it includes a short discussion of tools you can use to monitor and test server performance. While there is a discussion of some of the more prominent issues in tuning Web applications, this appendix does not delve into the application tuning issue exhaustively. For links and references to this and other topics, see the Resources section of this document.