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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T14:54:54+00:00

Firstly there’s a great overview of the IIS7 HTTP request lifecycle and various settings

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Firstly there’s a great overview of the IIS7 HTTP request lifecycle and various settings that affect performance here:

ASP.NET Thread Usage on IIS 7.0 and 6.0

Very specifically though, in dotNet 4 the defaults for maxConcurrentRequestsPerCPU and requestsQueueLimit are set to 5000. E.g. equivalent to: (in aspnet.config):

<system.web>
   <applicationPool 
      maxConcurrentRequestsPerCPU="5000" 
      maxConcurrentThreadsPerCPU="0" 
      requestQueueLimit="5000" /> (** see note below)
</system.web>

Seems to me that on a multi-CPU/core server the requestQueueLimit here will always be invoked well berfore the ‘perCPU’ limit. Thus, if a max of 5000 requests per CPU is what you actually want then I would expect that the requestQueueLimit needs to be increased to 5000 * CPUCount or just disabled altogether.

Is my interpretation correct? If so can I disable requestQueueLimit? (set it to zero?). The documentation on this setting doesn’t appear to address this question (so maybe I’m missing something or misreading?)

** side note from the above article: The requestQueueLimit is poorly named. It actually limits the maximum number of requests that can be serviced by ASP.NET concurrently. This includes both requests that are queued and requests that are executing. If the “Requests Current” performance counter exceeds requestQueueLimit, new incoming requests will be rejected with a 503 status code)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    ***Is my interpretation correct?

    Yes, if you want to execute more than 5000 requests concurrently, you’ll need to increase the requestQueueLimit. The requestQueueLimit restricts the total number of requests in the system. Due to its legacy, it is actually the total number of requests in the system, and not the number of requests in some queue. It’s goal is to prevent the server from toppling over due to lack of physical memory, virtual memory, etc. When the limit is reached, incoming requests will receive a quick 503 “Server Too Busy” response. By the way, the current number of requests in the system is exposed by the “ASP.NET\Requests Current” performance counter.

    ***can I disable requestQueueLimit? (set it to zero?)

    You can effectively disable it by setting it to a large value, like 50000. You must set the value in the aspnet.config fileI doubt your server can handle 50000 concurrent requests, but if so, then double that. Setting it to zero will not disable it…oddly, it means no more than one request can execute concurrently.

    By the way, it looks like there is a bug in v4. For integrated mode, it only successfully reads the value of requestQueueLimit if it is configured in the aspnet.config file as described on MSDN. For some reason, v4 was not reading it from machine.config when I experimented with it a little bit ago.

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