Another IIS Blog

Well, this didn't work too well. I had to replace the previous post with this one because the script had some issues. Let's start again: 

TechEd Northamerica started today. It's huge - more than 11,000 attendees from what I hear. One of my talks, titled "My Web Site is so slow…and I don't know what to do about it", happened this afternoon (here the PPTX).

Quick one today.

For web server performance testing the Microsoft Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) is the tool of choice of the IIS team as well as the Windows Performance Team. Simple tests that hammer IIS with thousands of requests to the same HTTP page to very sophisticated web hosting and benchmark scenarios - there is nothing that WCAT can't do. Even on ApacheCon I heard some hard-core Apache guys talking about using WCAT for their performance tests.

I was just reading Eric Lawrence's blog on Cache headers. In it Eric describes that it's necessary to use sensible values for the Max-Age headers because IE and several browsers don't like values greater than the size of a signed 32-Bit Integer, i.e. 2,147,483,647. Bigger values result in the content not being cached at all. Using the max 32-Bit integer value (2,147,483,647) is more than enough though. It caches the content for more than 68 years (max-age is using seconds so you divide 2,147,483,647 by 60 seconds by 60 minutes by 24 hours by 365 days which gets us to 68 years).

You might have read that the MySQL codebase was forked. The MySQL founder, Monty Widenius, is - how should we say it - not quite happy with the direction MySQL is going after the Oracle acquisition. So Monty and his team forked MySQL and called his branch MariaDB after his youngest daughter.

This blog post is about a small tool I just finished. It makes configuring and using SSL much easier. In the first part of the blog post I quickly review the problems and difficulties you run into when setting up SSL. Then I introduce SELFSSL7 and finally walk through several usage scenarios.

One thing we often hear from Web developers, especially those who offer Web site design and consulting services, is the need to get a Web site up quickly, which runs fast and gives them total control of the server for maximum flexibility and scalability. Today's post is about the four Microsoft Web Platform Images (AMIs) we offer on the Amazon EC2 platform. These four images allow you to start a blog, stream media or run a web application within minutes - live on the Internet!