IIS Web gardens and performance

Question

Is there any performance benefit in configuring web gardens in IIS?

Anyone have any real life examples?

Harlem

Answer 1

Under most circumstances, there is very little benefit to setting up web gardens and can actually cause issues if your application uses session state. The initial request may have come into one worker process, but then the next request might come into another. Here is a reference:

The reference is specific to IIS6 but the concepts apply to IIS7 as well.

Edit:

Here is a good reference from Scott Forsyth's Blog about the use of web gardens and why you should not use them: http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2011/06/13/why-you-shouldn-t-use-web-gardens-in-iis-week-24.aspx

Inadvertency

Edit: NOTE - here's the official Microsoft position about why in-proc session state should not be used with a web garden - msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178586.ASPX "Caution noteCaution If you enable Web-garden mode by setting the webGarden attribute to true in the processModel element of the application's Web.config file, do not use InProc session state mode. If you do, data loss can occur if different requests for the same session are served by different worker processes." – Axinomancy