IIS 6.0, Getting Information Using WMI
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In this article, we shall look into some of the internals of IIS and then further proceed to communicate with IIS using WMI with VBScript.
You can execute every script by saving each of them individually as text files with the “.vbs” extension and execute through the WSH engine (like wscript.exe or cscript.exe) from your MS-DOS prompt. Note that I tested all the scripts only with Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.
Internals of IIS
I don’t think there exists any web developer who doesn’t know IIS. It is one of the most famous web servers available on the market. It became quite famous with version 4.0 on Windows NT. It was later upgraded to 5.0 on Windows 2000 and further enhanced to 6.0 on Windows 2003. Version 7.0 is getting ready with Windows Vista! Before proceeding with IIS 6.0, I would like to have a discussion about the internals of IIS 5.0.
There was only one main process (or service) in IIS 5.0, represented by the executable inetinfo.exe that was designed to function as the main Web server process. This generally redirects requests to one or more out-of-process applications that are running within the “dllhost.exe”. The Inetinfo.exe is considered to be the master process through which each request must “penetrate” regardless of isolation mode.
IIS 5.0 mainly has three isolation modes namely:
- In-Process,
- Out-of-process
- Pooled.
When considering the ”In-Process” mode, all the applications run in the same process as that of the Web server (inetinfo.exe). The IIS 5.0 default mode is “pooled,” in which the Web server (Inetinfo.exe) runs in its own process and all other applications will run in one single-pooled process (dllhost.exe). You can set high-priority applications to run as Isolated, which creates another instance of dllhost.exe (which also burdens RAM).
Even though this out-of-process isolation allows you to increase the fault-tolerance of your Web server, it is slow in terms of performance. The Pooled mode is the best performance/isolation tradeoff, but there is only one pool on a server and all pooled applications must use the same pool.
Next: What is new in IIS 6.0? >>
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