Question

I’m investigating some performance improvements that can be made to our web server and ASP.NET application. This page contains a few things that we can do.

We currently have two worker processes running as a garden. Do each of these worker processes have their own ASP.NET threadpool? Or do both of these worker processes share a single threadpool and the max number of worker threads is shared across these processes?

This post seems to suggest that the two processes share a common ASP.NET threadpool.

All w3wp.exe threads do is take
requests from HTTP.SYS queue, process
it, and hand the request to
ASPNET_ISAPI.DLL, who then deposits
those requests into the ASP.Net
request queue, and the ASP.Net threads
service that queue.

But this post suggests that each worker process contains their own ASP.NET threadpool.

Each process (w3wp.exe) has its own
CLR thread pool which has the
configured maxworkerthreads value (20
default).

Which is correct?

Answer 1

Each worker process will have its own thread pool and separate ASP.NET request queue.

Processes can’t really share threads, threads run in the context of a single process.