Hello,
Looking for opinions on 32bit vs 64bit IIS. Our main internal application is .net/sql with 32bit iis front end, about 1000 users. This is for internal employees.
Do most people with larger IIS implementations then us stay with 32 bit iis and just implement software or hardware load balancers? Or do they migrate to 64 bit IIS then do the web farms or load balancers?
I'm leaning more towards staying 32bit and a hardware load balancer like F5's because of less headache with tool compatibility etc, not to mention the QA involved with going to 64bit. I'd prefer the hardware load balancing just because it seems to have more control and options but I might be wrong on that.
Just want to make to sure we are moving in the right direction, and get some opinions from people that might have already gone through this.
Thanks a lot
The real reason for a 64Bit Host is more addressable memory. If you are noticing that you are hitting memory limits, then upgrade the Bitness.
For example, running 32bit W2K3 Enterprise Edition with 8GB of RAM, there is still a hard limit on what an individual workprocess can consume. In Windows, this limit is roughly 2GB of RAM per running process, no matter how much physical RAM is installed. There are boot switches like /3GB that flip the ration for 3 / 1 and /PAE for physical adress extentions but there is still a virtual limit. As well, IIS is not PAE aware such as SQL.
You Workerprocess with be limited to 2GB each. But you could have a 32GB server with 16 workprocesses consuming 2GB each.
Hope it helps,
Hades666