anon's questions

I've seem some claims that Exchange (link) and Elasticsearch (link) can suffer from "too much" memory. I also read a vague hint in an old book that the same might be true of IIS:

[T]he more [RAM] the merrier, at least to a certain degree. If you have too much RAM, the IIS file cache cannot use it fully. Therefore it might be good not to exceed 2GB to 3GB of RAM for a standard Web server.

Can anyone confirm or refute the claim that an IIS server can have too much RAM? If the claim is true, is it a matter of fine-tuning the configuration?

The reason I ask is because I am seeing a possible performance issue in my production vs test environments in which the test environment, even under heavy load, seems to perform better with 16GB of RAM than the production which has 64GB. I am running IIS 8 on Windows Server 2012 R2 64-bit.

(The only ServerFault question that I could find doesn't address IIS specifically.)

I am trying to set up SQL Server on an Azure VM (that has an SSD) per the following articles:

• Performance Best Practices for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines
• Using SSDs in Azure VMs to store SQL Server TempDB and Buffer Pool Extensions

Specifically, one of the recommendations says:

Avoid using Azure data disk caching options (caching policy = None).

I would like to do that for the temp disk. In order to do that, it seems I need to use the PowerShell cmdlet Set-AzureDataDisk. One of the parameters is the LUN of the disk. To get the LUN, it seems I need to use diskpart.

However, on my freshly-provisioned VM, diskpart shows that the temp drive and the system drive have the same LUN ID (#0). Here's what diskpart shows for the system disk:

 DISKPART> select disk 0

 Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

 DISKPART> detail disk

 Virtual HD ATA Device
 Disk ID: 8C35C300
 Type   : ATA
 Status : Online
 Path   : 0
 Target : 0
 LUN ID : 0
 Location Path : ACPI(_SB_)#ACPI(PCI0)#ACPI(IDE0)#ACPI(CHN0)#ATA(C00T00L00)
 Current Read-only State : No
 Read-only  : No
 Boot Disk  : Yes
 Pagefile Disk  : No
 Hibernation File Disk  : No
 Crashdump Disk  : No
 Clustered Disk  : No

And here is what it shows for the temp disk:

 DISKPART> select disk 1

 Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

 DISKPART> detail disk

 Virtual HD ATA Device
 Disk ID: F26B3A20
 Type   : ATA
 Status : Online
 Path   : 0
 Target : 1
 LUN ID : 0
 Location Path : ACPI(_SB_)#ACPI(PCI0)#ACPI(IDE0)#ACPI(CHN0)#ATA(C00T01L00)
 Current Read-only State : No
 Read-only  : No
 Boot Disk  : No
 Pagefile Disk  : Yes
 Hibernation File Disk  : No
 Crashdump Disk  : Yes
 Clustered Disk  : No

My questions are:

1. Am I even going down the right path?
2. Can I just set the cache policy for both the system and temp disks? What is the impact?
3. If not, how do I get the temp disk to be on a different LUN?

I am looking at the command line options for defrag.exe as well as the "ScheduledDefrag" task on Windows Server 2012, and I don't understand some of the arguments. In particular, when I view defrag /? I see:

/D      Perform traditional defrag (this is the default).
/L      Perform retrim on the specified volumes.

What would a "non-traditional" defrag consist of? What is a retrim?

Also, under the scheduled task, the command line is

%windir%\system32\defrag.exe -c -h -k -$  

I see that -c means "all volumes," -h means "normal priority," -k means "slab consolidation," and apparently, -$ means "defrag.exe is being called from the task scheduler."

Why is -$ important?

Let's say I have the following setup:

• Office network that has an Active Directory server
• Off-site IIS server

I would like to turn off anonymous access on certain folders on the website with the same, so that users have to authenticate with their Active Directory credentials. I have two questions:

• What are the steps to do this?
• Is there a way to have a copy of AD on the IIS machine in case the office network goes down (power outage, etc)?

I have two websites. One is an "intranet," one is a public site that has "admin" areas:

www.example-intranet.com
www.example.com

They are both running on the same IIS 6 box.

www.example-intranet.com is password protected. That is, in IIS I've removed "anonymous access," I've checked "Basic authentication" and I've put in our AD server for the "Default domain." This part works fine.

Now, I want to do the same for www.example.com/admin. I thought I could follow the same steps (remove "anonymous access," add "basic authentication," and add the "default domain." However, users are being forced to log in twice (once for the intranet site, and then again when they go to www.example.com/admin.

It seems like the two sites are not "sharing" the login. How do I get this to work?

I have a fresh install of IIS 7, and under the Handler Mappings, I see a section for Disabled mappings and a section for Enabled. I want to disable a bunch of extensions (cshtml, aspq, etc). That is, I want to "move" them from the Enabled section to the Disabled section without deleting them. How do I do this?

(EDIT: Oops. It's IIS 7, not 7.5.)