Using IIS 5.0 to adjust the Web server's art and science--2

Why do I need to adjust my Web server?
Tuning your WEB server has several benefits for business considerations. First, improved performance as a result of the adjustment, thereby shortening the waiting time for the server response, allowing users to gain better experience. Tuning will help avoid bottlenecks and make your hardware more time-consuming, and you won't have to constantly upgrade or lengthen your Web Farm to acquire new server time. This allows you to have a budget when you really need to purchase parts such as memory, processor, or NIC.
In addition to these commercial considerations, there are some technical reasons related to tuning Web server performance. Tuning allows you to take full advantage of existing hardware and decide what upgrades to perform at this time and in the future. By tuning the Web server, you can maximize the productivity of your network applications and minimize response time, and determine which of these applications are handling high workloads as requested.
What needs to be adjusted
One of the difficulties in tuning a WEB server is how to know exactly what to adjust. For this reason, it is important to monitor the Web server before tuning settings, hardware, Web servers, or even upgrading to Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0. This is not enough to stress: gathering baseline information about your server lets you understand how they behave and precisely set goals for Web server performance. You can use Performance Monitor and performance counters built into the operating system and in IIS to establish this benchmark. Once you have collected baseline information, analyze them to determine the potential cause of performance problems before making a change, whether you add RAM or adjust internal IIS settings. Once you have made a change, remember to monitor the server again. The changes you make may cause unpredictable effects on other components of your system.
This topic is divided into five sections: hardware tuning issues, WEB application tuning issues, tools to monitor and stress test systems, security considerations, Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0 internal settings that affect WEB server performance.
Please note that these topics are not related to each other. To modify the internal settings from the upgrade hardware, tuning the Web server will require you to carefully monitor any changes that affect the performance of your Web server.
Monitoring hardware
Memory
It is common for problems that occur in the system to be caused by insufficient memory. You should monitor your memory first, and make sure your server has enough memory to add or subtract from other components. To perform IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000, the minimum amount of RAM required for a dedicated web server is 128MB, but preferably 256MB to 1GB. Additional memory is especially useful for e-commerce sites, sites with large content, and sites that handle high volumes of traffic. Because the "iis file cache defaults to using up to half of the available memory, the more memory you have, the more"iis the file cache.
Note: Windows Advanced Server can support up to 8GB of RAM, but "iis file cache will not take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM.