Josh Wieder

Helicon Ape is a great tool that allows people to stop complaining that Windows does not provide support for .htaccess, or for those who need URL rewriting in pre-Windows 2008 servers. For maximum confusion, Helicon names its configuration file httpd.conf like Apache. I made some modifications to the logging verbosity in that file, helping out an admin who hadn't realized that debug-level verbosity on redirect logging results not just in poor performance from the additional overhead needed to write to a file each time a URL is mod'd, but in a huge file that will quickly overwhelm available storage. Attempting to save http.conf resulted in errors because it was in use by a process so I copied my modified file to the desktop, renamed the existing conf file and copied my copy back into the Helicon configuration directory.  My changes weren't applied. The syntax was correct in my changes and Helicon kept processing redirects. Sure enough I compared permissions on the tw...

When thinking about launching an .NET application with IIS, memory tuning the webserver is often ignored. I often complained about how php.ini offered more straightforward means to address performance tuning - but I was wrong. Windows Server reserves half of its available RAM for the operating system. Of the remaining RAM, by default IIS will only allow 60% to be allocated to applications (in v1.0 I think it was actually 40%, in later versions its more generous). This setting is configurable, and can be set in your machine.config of the relevant framework path (%system% Microsoft.NET\Framework\) by adjusting the memoryLimit parameter . I recommend not reserving more than 80%. There is a ton to do here, and more than I can address in one post. Benchmarking these settings in development is a necessity, so do the needful and check out this overview here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647813.aspx