IIS 6.0, Getting Information Using WMI - What is new in IIS 6.0? (Page 2 of 5 )
IIS 6.0 is the next generation of Web server available in the Windows Server 2003 platform. IIS 6.0 obviously provides several enhancements over IIS 5.0 that are mainly intended to increase reliability, manageability, scalability, and security. IIS 6.0 is a key component of the Windows Server 2003 application platform, using which you can develop and deploy high performance ASP.NET Web applications, and XML Web Services. XML Web Services can be natively deployed and we can even convert IIS6.0 to be UDDI directory!
IIS 6.0 has been totally redesigned with a new request processing architecture that has the benefits of high isolation without incurring the out-of-process cost, as well as much higher levels of reliability and scalability. Let us go through some of the main components of IIS6.0.
- HTTP.SYS
- Web Administration Service
- Application Pool
- Worker Process
HTTP.SYS is a kernel-mode (OS level) HTTP listener that listens for incoming requests and queues those requests up on the appropriate queue. Kernel mode support is not available in IIS 5.0. Each request will be serviced by one application pool. An application pool in IIS 6.0 can contain one or more applications.
Web Administration Service is a user-mode configuration and process manager. The Web Administration Service component performs mainly Configuration and Process Management. When the Web server is first initialized, the Web Administration Service configures HTTP.SYS and the application pools (more about it later). It is also responsible for monitoring and controlling the lifetime of the worker processes (more about this later).
Application pools are used to manage a set of websites and applications. IIS 6.0 can support up to 2,000 application pools per server, and there can be multiple application pools operating at the same time. Application pools are separated from other application pools by Windows Server 2003 process boundaries. Therefore, an application in one application pool is not affected by applications in other application pools, and an application request cannot be routed to another application pool while being serviced by the current application pool.
A worker process services requests for the websites and applications in an application pool. All Web application processing, including loading of ISAPI filters and extensions, as well as authentication and authorization, is done by a new WWW service DLL, which is loaded into one or more host worker processes. The worker process executable is named W3WP.EXE.
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