Infrastructure.Tips

Exchange Server 2003, SQL Server and IIS Tips

By default, IIS caches only files that are 256 KB or less in size. If you have large data or multimedia files that are accessed frequently, you might want to increase this value to allow IIS to cache larger files.

Keep in mind that with file sizes over 256 KB you’ll reach a point at which caching won’t significantly improve performance. The reason for this is that with small files the overhead of reading from disk rather than the file cache is significant, but with large files the disk read might not be the key factor in determining overall performance.

To control the maximum cached file size, you create and then set the Windows Registry value MaxCachedFileSize.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
\SYSTEM
\CurrentControlSet
\Services
\InetInfo
\Parameters

Thanks for reading Infrastructure.Tips! If you found this tip useful, I hope you'll read IIS 6.0 Administrator's Pocket Consultant.

William R. Stanek