Any advantage to obtaining IIS6.0 for this problem?

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From: mko (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 04/20/04 

Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 20:31:08 -0700

Hello,

We are running an application over the internet using IIS5.0 and W2K server on a 3Ghz Xeon, connecting to a
database on an AIX machine using ODBC. Our application has intense periods of activity with currently 100
and eventually 300 users making requests at the same time, but for only short periods of time 2 to 3
minutes once or twice each day.

It is during these periods of activity that our users experience general slowness and some report the
website freezing for extended periods of time, greater than 30 seconds.
I have just changed the ASPProcessorThreadMax metabase property from 25 to 75 this appears to have helped
users on our site at peak time, reducing the incidence of freezing. I assume from the server Blocking
requests waiting for returns on fairly complex database queries, most of our ASP pages are just stubs that
call COM dll objects. Some of these objects are routines that are thousands of lines long, with ten
thousand lines being an upper limmit.

My real question is would upgrading to IIS6.0 increase web server performance with regards these periods of
short but very intense activity. At this stage we do not feel it should be necessary to load balance for
such a small userbase so I'm hoping for a software solution to improved performance. If the only real
lasting solution is additional hardware then eventually we shall take this approach.

Another thing I am trying to determine is regards Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 238583 which deals
with tuneing the ASPProcessorThreadMax variable, has anyone had any experience with altering this setting
in excess of the Microsoft recommended limit of 100. What is the downside ot increasing
ASPProcessorThreadMax to say 150 or 200? Also system logs indicate that processor usage is consistently
below 10%.

Thanks in advance if anyone can offer any suggestions.