14 DAY TRIAL // While there is no universal panacea for sluggish websites, Microsoft does offer a free tool designed to boost the responsiveness of sites leveraging Internet Information Services 7.5. With the release of Application Warm-Up for IIS 7.5, the Redmond company enables admins to boost website speed by ensuring that all web-based applications are already loaded before the first request even arrives from the user. When all tune-up efforts implemented can no longer optimize the performance of a site, Application Warm-Up for IIS 7.5 might just make the difference, just like warming up an engine in order to enjoy maximum performance.
“Have you ever hummed the Jeopardy theme song while waiting for a Web site to download - even on a high-speed Internet connection? Sometimes the problem is OUT of your control – whether it is an Internet traffic jam, scheduled maintenance, or some other unknown cause for a delay in receiving your request to view the latest on what the stock market is doing. But sometimes the problem is IN your control – such as pre-loading worker processes at the start of the Web server or when Overlapped Recycling occurs,” revealed Eric Rezabek, senior product manager, IIS/Web.
Application Warm-Up for IIS 7.5 is currently in Beta 1 stage and comes in both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) flavors. According to Microsoft, the IIS extension comes with support for the latest iterations of the Windows client and server platforms, namely Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
“By proactively loading and initializing all the dependencies such as database connections, compilation of ASP.NET code, and loading of modules, IT Professionals can ensure their Web sites are responsive at all times even if their Web sites use a custom request pipeline or if the Application Pool is recycled,” Rezabek added.
Application Warm-Up Module for IIS 7.5 – Beta is available for download here.