SharePoint Portal Server 2003 IIS worker process configuration

One of my clients has a medium server SharePoint farm. Two front end servers configured with 4 GB’s of RAM and 1000 users pounding these boxes number of times every day. Being a medium server farm implementation no real performance testing was done on the server to determine memory and processor needs. We ended up ordering top of the line HP servers and max’d them with 4 GB’s of memory.

I set the /3GB switch to maximize the use of RAM by SharePoint. The IIS worker process was configured to recycle if it uses greater than 700 MB’s. This ensured optimal load times and performance of the Sharepoint portal server.

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After this configuration set up, I found that the worker process was recycling at least 3 times an hour. A number of times recycling the worker process would fail and cause IIS related errors within SharePoint. I know that SharePoint wasn’t really using all the memory it had available on the server. Increasing the maximum used memory for the worker process to recycle beyond 850 MB as this would cause performance degradation.

To configure the Web garden correctly is the answer. You can specify the number of worker process (w3p.exe) in a Web garden by following the process below.

To configure a Web garden by using IIS Manager

1.	In IIS Manager, expand the local computer, expand Application Pools, right-click the application pool, and then click Properties.
2.	Click the Performance tab, and under Web garden, in the Maximum number of worker processes box, type the number of worker processes that you want to assign to the application pool. (You must type a number greater than 1 for the application pool to become a Web garden.
3.	Click OK.

The key is to balance worker process with memory. Specifically if you have 3 GB’s of memory available for SharePoint to use it would make sense to have a web garden with 2 or 3 worker processes. Keep in mind if you have other application running on the same server you need to account for those in terms of memory as well. At a minimum you have the SharePoint Central Admin worker process on the front end machine.

See below how the two w3p.exe processes are utilizing optimal amount of memory. This setting has resulted in my worker processes recycling from 3 times in an hour to once or twice a day resulting in better performance , availability and reliability. Here is an interesting link on IIS 6.0 performance tuning.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/events/iis/tnt1-89.mspx/maintain/optimize/perflink.mspx