Learn Windows IIS in a Month of Lunches

Chapter 4. Managing application pools

Let’s face it, as an administrator your biggest concern with IIS is this: will it keep running your sites and applications reliably? Have you ever had a misbehaving application, one that leaks memory and starts to slow down your computer? Without dealing with the situation, your computer will eventually crash and need to be rebooted. Websites and applications are no different. Some of them are well-behaved little children running on your web server. Others are nightmares eating up memory and hogging processing. Without the ability to separate the good from the bad, you’d find yourself going to the office in the middle of the night to restart your web servers.

Application pools provide isolation to each website ...