IIS Memory Management (Part 1)
My thoughts:
Here we go, with a simple terminology Memory Management. Is it something simple in reality? I guess not! (which is why, I have segregated this topic into multiple blog posts) Memory Management in any product has its own significant approach on handling process threads and client requests. Process Threads? Okay!! Let us not deviate to System Internals for now! :-) ...
...instead, allow me to rephrase it as IIS as a webserver has its own method of handling client requests! When we say Client Requests, it could mean a lot, such as, the load on the server, total number of sessions, total number of visits / pageviews, and so on! However, this area of Memory Management gets maximum importance as soon we think about dynamic websites.
Now, what is a dynamic website? Well, answer is not just "Websites with dynamic web content!". :-) ... On a practical note, a dynamic website is one which has an effectual usage of the server memory space, while serving client requests to fetch or process a data, (which in most cases designed as a third normal form; resulting in primary key - foreign key database architecture) based on the criteria opted by the end-user. In such a situation, to trigger this kind of data manipulation / processing / transaction that occurs on the server memory space, we use programming languages like ASP.NET.
This results in creating dynamic webpages where-in the webserver takes the complete load on an end-to-end scenario, which again means, memory utilization on the IIS processes, that is, inetinfo.exe / mtx.exe (IIS 4.0) / dllhost.exe (IIS 5.0) / w3wp.exe (IIS 6.0), as I have shared in my blog about IIS Version Comparison. This design on its entirety shall be termed as a dynamic website.
Hope you find this blog a good start on IIS Memory Management!
You may click here to find additional reference on this topic.
Watch out for my next blog - IIS Memory Management (Part 2) ... :-)
Cheers,
Siva