Would you like your Microsoft IIS Web servers to run more reliably without interruption? Would you like applications that can declare themselves unfit to live and automatically restart without administrative intervention? Would you like clients to be able to upload a large number of files, resume if the transfer fails, and not consume all your bandwidth? Would you like Web applications that meet all these goals and don't exceed 50 percent of the CPU? If you've used IIS 5.0 and IIS 4.0, you might be surprised when I tell you that IIS 6.0 moves you closer to meeting these goals.
Microsoft.com's Results
At Microsoft TechEd in Dallas in June 2003, Casey Jacobs, group manager for Microsoft.com, and I gave a presentation. Casey presented a few statistics about Microsoft.com, which is the largest IIS 6.0 deployment to date:
- 99.8 percent uptime (according to Keynote Systems, which tests Web site performance)
- 950 servers and three data centers
- 80 Internet sites serving 1000 Microsoft SQL Server databases and thousands of Web applications
- 25.5 million home page views in March 2003
- more than 75,000 requests per second
- more than 300,000 concurrent users
- 20 system engineers, 12 DBAs, and 16 staff members who provide 24 * 7 support
Better than 99 percent uptime on 950 servers supported by 20 system engineers is impressive, especially considering that this information comes directly from the people in the field, not from the marketing department. The Microsoft people achieved these numbers with a mixture of IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.0 servers.