IIS Web Garden advantages / disadvantages [closed]

Question

When do you need IIS Web Garden feature. What's pro's and con's?

Answer 1

Web Gardens help immensely with improving process intensive managed code. Without WG, all threads servicing requests contend for same resources. When threads attempt to allocate memory, they often induce Garbage Collection. The Garbage Collection activity freezes all threads while it cleans up memory and grants the request. This happens for almost every running thread. By splitting the workload over multiple processes, each process has its own managed memory space and its own garbage collections. Overall CPU processing goes up only marginally, but CPU% for the W3WP.exe drops significantly, transaction execution time drops, and transactions per second rate goes up.

Answer 2

If you have a multi-processor web-server (and most environments do have one) and performance is low and CPU utilization is low as well, you might want to consider a web garden. The basic idea is that instead of a single worker process for the IIS Service, a garden has one worker process per CPU, thereby boosting performance.

Here is how to configure the garden.

Answer 3

Complete answer from David Wang.
Pros:

• An interim solution for faulty applications.

Cons:

• Worse overall performance.
• Prevent the use of session state in the process. So in statefull application you have another performance penalty to serialize the state to an external store.