BillS IIS Blog : Performance

Why IIS7? Top 12 cool features…

bills — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:13:45 GMT

Every time I talk with customers in meetings or at conferences I’m struck by how many cool amazing new capabilities IIS7 has. I can go on for literally hours talking about the new features and benefits, and showing demos. And with each new IIS7 Extension, the list of new features just gets bigger and bigger. A few months ago I realized we didn’t have the top list of features written up anywhere, and so we started the process of distilling down the list to the top 10. We almost made it! We ended up with the top 12 reasons you should get IIS7 today. Check them out here:

http://www.iis.net/getstarted

Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding a cool demo for each of the reasons to show the features in action. Be sure to check back soon!

IIS7 Request Routing and Load Balancer Release Candidate Available for Download

bills — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:38:03 GMT

I’m excited to announce that IIS has released a Release Candidate of the new IIS7 Application Request Routing (ARR) extension! ARR enables Web server administrators to easily scale-out Web applications and improve reliability through HTTP-level, rule-based routing and load balancing. Read more about the cool new features in this new release and check out the updated documentation.

Download the RC release:

For those who are new to IIS7’s ARR module, here are the benefits it provides:

Balance loads more efficiently across servers to maximize resource utilization

By taking advantage of Application Request Routing, administrators have the ability to create powerful routing rules based on URL, HTTP headers and server variables to determine the most appropriate Web application server for each request. ARR makes request routing decisions at the application level, and can be used in conjunction with hardware load balancers as an added layer of control over HTTP requests. For example, using the Application Request Router, administrators are able to route all *.aspx requests to a dynamic group of dedicated Web application servers, which can scale up and down based on traffic demands, while requests for video content, images, javascript and other static content can be served from the ARR machine, or a separate group of servers.

Increase Security and Scalability of Application Servers

Administrators can use IIS7 and the Application Request Routing feature on a reduced-footprint Windows Server core machine(s) to handle incoming requests, and then place traditional Web Application Servers on a middle tier of machines, which can protected behind additional firewalls and not exposed directly to the internet. This protects feature-rich Web application servers from being directly exposed to internet hacking attempts, and enables to scale-out cpu-intensive Web application servers independently.

Manage and monitor multiple server farms more easily through IIS Manager

ARR lets administrators create, manage, and apply load balancing rules to server farms in IIS 7.0 Manager. Administrators can then easily add or remove servers from a server farm to match demand without impacting application availability. ARR also includes live traffic and URL test monitoring capabilities to determine the health of individual servers and configuration settings, while allowing administrators to view aggregated runtime statistics in IIS 7.0 Manager.

Optimize and scale server capacity through client and host name affinity

Administrators can use ARR to route all requests from a specific client to a specific Web application server in a server farm by creating an affinity between the client and server. ARR includes the ability to differentiate clients behind Network Address Traversal (NAT) firewalls and hardware load-balancers, so each client is treated independently. Host name affinity lets hosting providers optimize resources per server and offer scaled solutions by routing requests to servers based on host name.

Features

HTTP based routing decisions built using rules that examine HTTP request information
Sophisticated load balancing algorithms to determine appropriate servers to service the HTTP requests
Health monitoring for live traffic and specific URLs to determine the health of servers with a set of configuration parameters provided to calibrate baseline server health
Client affinity to direct all requests from a client to a specific server by using cookies.
Host name affinity to streamline administration for Web servers and to create additional business opportunities.
Management of multiple server farms to enable pilot management and A/B testing scenarios.
Management and monitoring of all configuration settings and aggregated runtime statistics through IIS Manager interface.
Support for Failed Request Tracing Rules

Real World Performance Data on IIS7

bills — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:24:00 GMT

Interested in knowing what kind of performance gains you can expect from IIS7? The Microsoft.com operations folks have put together a great summary of their real-world performance data. The short story is: IIS7 servers handle 31% more requests per second than their IIS6 peers, at a slightly higher CPU rate. For all the gory details, read the Microsoft.com blog!

Microsoft Announces Interoperability Improvements for PHP and Microsoft technologies

bills — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:54:00 GMT

Last year at ZendCon 2006, I was invited to be a part of the Microsoft and Zend announcement initiating technical collaboration with the PHP community to significantly enhance the reliability and performance of PHP on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. As part of this collaboration, the IIS product group has delivered a new component for IIS6 and IIS7 called FastCGI Extension which enables IIS to much more effectively host PHP applications.

Today, I am back at ZendCon, invited to be a part of the Keynote presentation to provide an update on the Zend/Microsoft collaboration project and make several new announcements related to improving interoperability of PHP and Microsoft technologies.

First, Zend and Microsoft will continue work on FastCGI and scalable PHP hosting on Windows Servers. Specifically, Zend has committed to redistribute FastCGI in Zend Core, its certified PHP 5 offering. In addition, Zend will ensure that Zend Core fully supports the Server Core installation option for Windows Server 2008, allowing their optimized PHP to be hosted on the most streamlined version of Windows Server ever released.

Second, Zend and Microsoft are a strategic partnership to enable support for Information Cards by PHP developers through a component built for Zend Framework.

Third, Microsoft is announcing the availability this week of the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP. The PHP Driver delivers an API designed to enable reliable, scalable integration with SQL Server for PHP applications deployed on the Windows platform. Microsoft envisions working together with Zend and the PHP Community to ensure that the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is a great offering for PHP developers and part of Zend’s core PHP offering.

Some more details on the announcements:

FASTCGI/IIS

· The next release of Zend Core, Zend’s certified version of PHP 5, will redistribute Microsoft’s FastCGI, ensuring for all of Zend’s Windows customers, that PHP is as reliable and scalable as possible on Windows Servers.

· Zend Core will support the Server Core installation option of Windows Server 2008, allowing Zend’s customers to run PHP on Windows in the most streamlined and secure environment possible.

· FastCGI is available for IIS 5.1/IIS 6.0 as a Go Live release, meaning customers have a free license to deploy this production-quality release on Windows Server 2003 today.

· FastCGI will ship in Windows Server 2008 as a built-in IIS component for the first time, sparing customers the hassle of downloading, installing and patching 3^rd party products.

· Microsoft embraces PHP hosting on Windows by building the enabling technology but also by working with the PHP community to ensure that popular PHP applications will run performantly on the Windows platform.

· For more information regarding FastCGI or PHP on Windows, visit http://www.iis.net/php.

SQL SERVER 2005 DRIVER FOR PHP

· On Tuesday, Microsoft is announcing the availibility this week of the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP. As part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to interoperability, the PHP Driver provides an optimized way for developers to leverage SQL Server 2005 in their PHP application.

· With this Driver, we are proud to address the needs of customers who have asked for a Microsoft-supported solution, and bring SQL Server’s scalability to PHP developers.

· The Driver is implemented as a procedural direct extension (also referred to as [])

· Microsoft envisions working together with Zend and the PHP Community to ensure that the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is a great offering for PHP developers and part of Zend’s core PHP offering.

CARDSPACE

· Microsoft Corp. today announced at ZendCon a strategic partnership with Zend Technologies that will ultimately provide people with better control over their personal information on the Web and greatly improve the trustworthiness of Web-based interactions.

· The strategic partnership will enable support for Information Cards by PHP developers through a component built for Zend Framework (Zend’s open source PHP application framework for developing Web applications and Web services).Using this component standalone or as part of the framework, PHP developers will be able to specify a Web site’s security policy and accept information cards from trusted third parties.

· Zend is producing an implementation of the Windows CardSpace authentication mechanism called Zend_Infocard, which will enable Web sites to validate CardSpace authentication tokens submitted to the Web site. Windows CardSpace enables users to provide their digital identities in a familiar, secure and simple way.

For additional information, read the Zend Press Release.

Free IIS7 Online Training

bills — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:36:00 GMT

A few months ago the IIS team did a quick tour of Europe, speaking in various cities and countries in an all-day IIS conference specifically geared toward training people on IIS7. Luckily, the good people of Poland decided to record and publish the training for everyone to use. Check out the sessions below to watch Brett Hill and Isaac Roybal present IIS7. Here is a list of all the sessions: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/itsshowtime/result_search.aspx?event=69&x=13&y=2

IIS 7 Web Server Platform- Windows Server “Longhorn”

Microsoft’s Next Generation Web Server: What’s New in IIS 7 for IT Pros

Isaac Roybal, Product Manager, Windows Server, Microsoft Corporation

This overview session will highlight the key points of interests for IT Pros in Internet Information Services version 7. IIS7 modularity increases security by allowing a reduced installation footprint and creation of specialized, streamlined servers. Application Pools are now “sandboxed” by default. You’ll see how IIS7 eases administration with a new IIS Manage UI, delegated administration, and new tools for automating administrative tasks. Applications run more reliably as they are easier to troubleshoot with built in tracing and diagnostics. Finally, multiple servers can use a single configuration file with the shared configuration feature for web farms.

IIS7 Administration: The New IIS Manager

Brett Hill, IIS Sr. Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

IIS7 Administration centers around the new task-oriented IIS Manager. This redesigned administration tool has many major new capabilities including the ability to delegate features, edit .NET configuration and has significantly improved performance when managing many sites. The IIS Manager itself is an extensible, modular application that administrators can customize and developers can extend. In this presentation we’ll explore how use and control the IIS Manager with a special focus on Delegated Administration. In addition, we’ll explore how to use Granular Locking to fine tune your delegated settings beyond those available in the UI.

IIS7 Administration: Shared Configuration, Remote Control, and Automated Tools

Isaac Roybal, Product Manager, Windows Server, Microsoft Corporation

For web farms, IIS7 has a powerful new feature – Shared Configuration. This allows you to configure multiple servers to share a single configuration file. The benefits are clear - all web servers have identical configuration so there’s no need to do configuration replication.

In addition, IIS Manager has built in remote administration capabilities. Using https between the IIS Manager and the remote server, this feature includes the ability to define trusted users in IIS Manager and have identities securely stored in the IIS configuration, Windows SAM or AD, or a .NET provider.

Of course, many organizations need to automate administration tasks. APPCMD is the new powerful, general purpose command line utility for controlling configuration, state for site and pools, and querying status. WMI has been improved specifically for IIS management, and there’s a new managed code API Microsoft.Web.Adminsitrationis that makes it easy for developers use .NET to write IIS management tools. PowerShell can use the managed API or WMI, giving you a superior command line and scripting environment for managing your servers.

IIS 7 Security: Less Exposure, Greater Control

Brett Hill, IIS Sr. Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

IIS7 security improvements can be found in many areas. In addition to the ability to control the server footprint, security is improved with the new URLFiltering and URLAuthorization capabilities. Also, you can now use Forms authentication with any content while leveraging .NET role and membership providers. In addition, there are key changes in the user principles and groups used by IIS7 that will make the server both easier to manage and more secure. Finally, application pool sandboxing helps to improve the security boundary between application pools.

IIS 7 Troubleshooting: Failed Request Tracing

Isaac Roybal, Product Manager, Windows Server, Microsoft Corporation

One of the most exciting features in IIS 7 for administrators is the new built-in failed request tracing capabilities. You can configure IIS 7 to automatically create a detailed trace log of events that occurred in the request processing pipeline when specific error codes are seen and/or if a request takes more than N seconds to complete. This is configurable at the server, site, application, or file level, and can be configured in the UI or with a command line tool. The resulting trace log is ideal for identifying bottlenecks. Like everything in IIS 7, it is extensible and can be customized with new events.

IIS7 Output Caching for Dynamic Content - Speed Up Your ASP and PHP Applications

bills — Wed, 02 May 2007 09:21:00 GMT

IIS7 has a new output cache feature that can cache dynamic content (output from your ASP.NET, Classic ASP, PHP or other dynamic pages) in memory. This can yield enormous performance improvements since it means that the script used to generate that dynamic output doesn't need to run for each request. The cache is "smart" enough to vary the output cached based on query string values as well as HTTP headers sent from the client to the server. The cache is also integrated with the http.sys kernel mode driver, enabling blazing fast performance.

When to use it

IIS automatically caches static content (like HTML pages, images, and style sheets) for you, since these types of content don't change from request to request. IIS also detects changes to the files when you make updates, and flushes the cache as needed.

The output from dynamic pages can now be cached in memory as well. Not every dynamic page can take advantage of the output cache. Pages that are highly personalized (like shopping cart / e-commerce transactions) are not good candidates because the dynamic output isn't likely to be requested again and again, and the memory used to cache the content would be wasted. Content that is output as a result of a POST type request to an HTML form is also not cacheable.

Good candidates for the output cache are pages which are semi-dynamic in nature meaning the data is generated dynamically, but isn't likely to change from request to request based on the URL or the header information. For example, photo gallery type applications that dynamically resize images for display in a web page are great candidates for the output cache because caching the data saves the server from having to re-process the image resizing for each request. You can read more about this scenario, and how I used the output cache to get more than an order of magnitude greater performance with a PHP photo gallery application here. Another good example of a type of application that can take advantage of the output cache feature is a stock ticker application. Let's use it to walk through how such an application can take advantage of the output cache:

Varying the cache

Let's assume for this example that I have an application that allows the user to input a stock symbol which submits the symbol the my application as such: http://server/showStockPrice.asp?symbol=MSFT

In this case, the URL is always http://server/showStockPrice.asp, but the querystring value (symbol=MSFT) tells the showStockPrice.asp page which data to include in the response, therby varying the output of the page by querystring value. This is called varyByQuerystring in output cache lingo. IIS also supports another type of cache policy: varybyHeaders which can vary the cache based on the HTTP headers that are sent from the client to the server.

Caching the output of this data is useful, because it is likely that many people may in fact by requesting the stock price for "hot" stocks ( like MSFT! :) ), and by caching it I save the server from having to lookup the current stock price for a particular symbol for each request.

Invalidating the cache

Since we're caching dynamic data, there is a good chance it is going to change and we will need to flush the cache, allowing new data to be retrieved and re-cached. In this example, the stock price is likely to change frequently. Even in the case where the stock price is changing every second, it may be useful to cache the data if the site is getting hundreds of requests per second. That could mean one trip to the database to retrieve the stock price, instead of a hundred every second, saving the Web server and the database server from extra work.

IIS supports two types of invalidation schemes for dynamic content. The first is a simple timeout period. The configuration property for this is CacheForTimePeriod. The other way to invalidate the cache is for IIS to detect a change to the underlying resource. The configuration property for this CacheUntilChange. Use this type of invalidation scheme only when you want the cache flushed when the underlying resource (in this case showStockPrice.asp) changes.

Configuring the cache

The cache is pretty easy to configure, and comes with a fancy UI feature in the new IIS admin tool to configure it (beta 3+ only).

You can also configure the feature in your local web.config file that lives in the content directory. Here is a sample of the configuration needed for our showStockPrice.asp page, with a varyByQueryString parameter of * (meaning cache all unique variations of querystring parameters) and a timeout of 1 second.

<configuration>
     <location path="showStockPrice.asp">
       <system.webserver>	
         <caching>
           <profiles>
             <add varybyquerystring="*"location="Any"
               duration="00:00:01" policy="CacheForTimePeriod"
               extension=".asp">
           </profiles>
	</caching>
       </system.webserver>
   </location>
</configuration>

If I want to cache this data in kernel for every faster performance, all I need to do is change the "policy" attribute to kernelCachePolicy. Note: there are a few limitations you should be aware of with the kernel mode cache, read more about them below.

More Information

ThomaD recently published a more extensive article on output caching, located here: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/154/iis-7-output-caching/ It will walk you through an end to end example of using the output cache, and provide troubleshooting tips and much more information on how to use this powerful new IIS7 feature.

Note: ASP.NET already has an 'output cache' feature that is very closely integrated with ASP.NET. This IIS output cache feature works in parallel with that one, and works for all types of applications.