IIS and web garden configuration

Question

Are there significant performance advantages to allowing IIS to spawn multiple worker processes per application pool (web-garden configuration). What perfmon counters would indicate that this might be a good idea?

I know that session state must run out of process, but are there any other gotchas?

Answer 1

I did some research and found this useful article, which cover a number of potential issues, and outlines some pros and cons:

EDIT:

http://blogs.iis.net/chrisad/1342059

Answer 2

Basically, if you expect your application is likely to lock/block, then you can have a webgarden of size larger than one to help limp along until your health monitoring kicks in and shuts down/restarts the misbehaving process. So, use webgardens in that case as a temporary crutch until you resolve the locking/blocking issue.

Otherwise, don't use web gardens (set the value to "1" and leave it alone). Because it's better to fix the code than to use this poor mechanism.