Again, threads don't improve performance, in fact they degrade performance
and on some platforms (namely, Windows) they can degrade performance very
quickly. Context switching between threads on Win32 is *really, really*
expensive (several hundred instructions in kernel space). Without
processors to back up the threads you can just end up wasting cycles
switching between threads and not accomplishing real work.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andy Armstrong [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2001 9:18 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Anyone know why the ISAPI redirector works how it does?
>
>
> (sorry to follow myself up, but I've just found some more evidence about
> this)
>
> Andy Armstrong wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> > Yeah, well I'm not entirely convinced myself. I'm guessing, from what
> > I've read on the MS site, that IIS actually runs with quite a small,
> > fixed size, pool of threads and relies on its ability to serve static
> > content very quickly to ensure that this is adequate. As soon as you
> > start executing (relatively) slow requests in threads from this pool you
> > end up with most of the threads blocked. That's my reading anyway -- I
> > might do some experiments to find out how many distinct threads IIS is
> > using before I do anything else.
> >
> > I am prepared to believe that if IIS is tightly optimized for static
> > content and runs with a thread pool that is only just large enough for
> > its normal needs that this might be the case, though, like you, I'm a
> > little sceptical.
>
> Hmm. Well, surprisingly, according to this page[1] the default thread
> pool size for IIS is 10 times the number of processors and the server
> doesn't do anything adaptive with this number though it can be changed
> in the registry. This number does seem surprisingly low -- I can see
> how, in cases where the server was handling a lot of traffic of which
> some was being delegated to Tomcat there could be starvation.
>
> [1] http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:2jnr72XWvVU: \
> msdn.microsoft.com/componentresources/html/articles \
> /ta/ta_030.asp+iis+thread+pool+size&hl=en
>
> --
> Andy Armstrong, Tagish
