IIS 6 RAM Allocation on Windows Server 2003

Question

I have my IIS 6 running my website. It is on a Windows Server 2003 which has 4GB of RAM. I run SQL intensive code after the user submits a form (math statistics stuff). This process is not threaded (should it be, especially if 2 or more users run the same thing?). But my process seems to consume only a couple of GBs of memory and the server crawls. How do I get my IIS process to use nearly all the memory?

I see on other sites that its 2GB or 3GB allocated using boot.ini. But is there another way for the process to use memory? If I make it multithreaded, will there be a process for each thread?

Answer 1

If there is still memory free for IIS, it does not need more. Even if you give it more memory it will perform better. It is good to see some memory is not used and can be used for other processes as IIS. If you want to make is multi threading, it depends on what you do parallel if more memory is used, and if you gain any performance.

The basic here is to start with your requirements and see what peak use you can have. Then make a performance test to see if your machine can handle that load. To be sure you can handle some more do an other test to see the peek load your machine can handle. Then you will know if you have to invest any more time.

Check you database server to see if you bottleneck is not on that machine, most developers forget optimizing and maintaining their databases.