Tips for Optimizing Windows 2000 Web Server Performance

• Prior to upgrading to Windows 2000, you must uninstall Inoculan, PCAnywhere, and Veritas. You can install them again after you install Windows 2000.
• Run most of your applications in the new default medium protection mode (out-of-process pool). When applications are pooled, they share the same process, thereby reducing memory overhead. Also, running under medium protection allows for greater reliability than running your applications with low protection (in process).
• Check Event Logs for a high number of service restarts on both local and remote servers. If applications are failing frequently, performance will be very poor, but you might not notice the failures because reliable restarts are done automatically by the IISReset utility.
• Perform disk defragmentation from time to time on your servers. The files and directories on your server become fragmented over time. When this occurs, it takes Windows longer to gain access to files and directories because several additional disk reads are required to collect the various pieces. For information about the Windows 2000 Disk Defragmenter, see the Windows 2000 online documentation.
• If you are using SSL, make sure that the License Logging Service is enabled, even if anonymous users are accessing your Web servers.
• Do not routinely or periodically reboot IIS servers. Use the IISReset.exe utility instead. Servers should be rebooted only as a last resort. Also, report system errors (blue screens) to PSS so that the problem can be resolved.
• Upgrade from IIS 4.0 to IIS 5.0 using one of these methods:
  • The rolling upgrade: upgrade one of your test servers before your entire suite of servers, and then upgrade your other computers.
  • The methodical upgrade: first create a set of tests for IIS 4.0, and then run the tests on your computers prior to upgrading to IIS 5.0. Upgrade to IIS 5.0 and then run the tests again and measure performance differences between your old system and your new system.
• When possible, use unattended install scripts to simplify upgrades.
• If you are using Visual Basic objects, you will not see performance gains on apartment-threaded applications or on synchronous calls with global scope.
• High performance using Index Server 3.0 with Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0 requires changes to the registry. For more information, see "Best Practices" in the "Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools/Performance Monitoring" section of the Windows 2000 online documentation.
• If you used disk mirroring on Windows NT 4.0, be sure to do the following:
  • Make a good backup before the upgrade, and leave the Windows NT 4.0 mirroring intact while upgrading to Windows 2000. This allows you to retain a legacy disk mirror.
  • Make sure that your mirrored disk drives are dynamic. Windows 2000 requires this. Before a drive can be converted to dynamic, you must have approximately 1 MB of free space at the end of the disk. It may also be necessary to defragment the disk. For more information, see Knowledge Base article Q197738 - Not Enough Space Available to Upgrade to a Dynamic Disk.
  • In order to establish new mirrors, resize the partition before upgrading to Windows 2000.
  • See these additional Knowledge Base articles: Q175761 - Dynamic vs. Basic Storage in Windows 2000 and Q231376 - Legacy FT Sets Regenerate During a Windows 2000 Upgrade.
• Read the documents listed in the "Resources" section of this appendix.