Microsoft's Whistler: Now Serving Up Beta 2

Scheduled for release during the second half of the year, Microsoft Whistler Server offers some important enhancements for Web site operators and hosting services that have been slow to adopt Windows 2000. We took a look at the latest beta release, Beta 2, build 2462, which offers a preview of what's to come. In addition to enhancements such as built-in CD burning and support for ZIP files, Whistler Server has the same user interface as Windows XP.

You can administer the Internet Information Server in Version 6 (IIS6) simply by editing a very large XML configuration file called the Metabase. Saving the file when you're done automatically activates the changes. And because the Metabase is written in XML, you can write your own programs to edit it.

Busy network administrators crave powerful command line and scripting capabilities, because these features allow them to complete hours of work in seconds. Windows servers have been strong in scripting but comparatively weak in command line administration.

By writing a series of scripts to perform administration tasks, Microsoft used the former capability to fortify the latter. Administrators can tailor the scripts, which are reasonably well documented, to meet special needs.

In view of the number and significance of the improvements to IIS6, Whistler is a significant overhaul. For example, in Windows 2000, IIS5 could isolate an ISAPI (Internet Server Application Program Interface) application in its own process, preventing the application from interrupting the Web server process. But this took a performance penalty. Microsoft has restructured IIS6 to eliminate the performance hit. The HTTP server is a separate kernel-mode process with caching that runs no matter how dysfunctional the sites become.

Among other enhancements, the IIS code now lets multiple instances of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs run faster. ASP pages are cached at the server in a preinterpreted state so that they don't have to be interpreted at runtime.

IIS administrators know that poorly written software suffering from memory leaks is common. Such applications request memory but fail to release it when it's no longer needed, causing a systemwide slowdown. IIS6 lets you schedule a second instance of a program, then terminate the first when it becomes idle. Hence, if you're running a leaky application, you can do so without compromising the whole server. In fact, IIS6 restarts any Web application that crashes.