Administering Network Resources

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

IIS 6.0 provides a set of Quality of Service (QoS) features to help you maintain acceptable service levels of data transmission on your network. The goal of QoS is to ensure that particular sites or applications do not monopolize server resources, such as memory or CPU cycles, which can adversely affect performance. QoS helps administrators control how IIS components — such as sites, application pools, or the WWW service as a whole — use resources.

If the bandwidth on your server is not sufficient to support demand, you can increase overall server bandwidth. You can also increase the effective bandwidth of existing communication links. Some suggestions on how to do so follow; many involve setting parameters that can only be modified by editing the Windows registry or the IIS 6.0 metabase.

It is frequently possible to reduce your use of bandwidth by optimizing Web application scripts or content. This option is worth looking into as an interim solution, partly because it can also improve response time and the user experience; however, if your client base is growing, you might eventually have to increase the bandwidth of your network connection anyway.

You can sometimes effectively increase existing bandwidth by limiting connections, by increasing the length of the connection queues, or by enabling HTTP Keep-Alives.

QoS in IIS provides the following methods for managing and maintaining network performance: