Application Pools

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Roughly speaking, an application pool consists of one or more web applications that share processing time together as a single process. You must decide whether to put MainBossWeb into an existing application pool or to create a new pool that only contains MainBossWeb. The following considerations apply:

Each application pool takes up a considerable amount of memory. Therefore, you can reduce memory requirements if you put MainBossWeb into an existing pool.
Since all applications in a pool must share the processing time allocated to that pool, MainBossWeb will have to share time with everything else in the pool. In particular, if you put MainBossWeb into a pool that contains a high-traffic process, the performance of MainBossWeb will suffer—the high-traffic process will monopolize allotted processing time.

Perhaps the ideal is to put MainBossWeb into an existing pool whose other members only have a modest amount of traffic.

.NET VERSION: When you create an application pool, you specify which .NET version it uses. All applications within the pool must use the same .NET version. Thus, you must put MainBossWeb into a pool that uses .NET 4.6. Your site may have other ASP.NET applications which use different versions of .NET (e.g. .NET framework v2.0.50727); you cannot put MainBossWeb into such a pool. Furthermore, you should not change the .NET version of any existing pools, since any applications within those pools will stop working.

Application Pool Identity: Each application pool must have an identity. This corresponds to a login name that will be used to run all the applications in the application pool. The login name must have sufficient permissions to run all the applications in the pool. In particular, the identity login name for the pool that contains MainBossWeb must have all the permissions required by MainBoss. The name must also have all the SQL Server permissions required to access the MainBoss database.

Important: Whatever application pool you use for the web site, we recommend that it should run in the Integrated managed pipeline mode. This ensures appropriate authentication security. However, as discussed in Security Considerations, some cell phone and PDA services do not support integrated authentication, so you may have to choose a different authentication scheme.

To work with application pools, you use the IIS manager. Start the manager on the computer where you will run the web server. (See Initial Set-Up of this guide for a reference on how to start the IIS manager.)

If you decide to create a new application pool for MainBossWeb, you must create the pool:

In the left-hand panel of the IIS manager, expand the entry labeled with the name of the computer.
Right-click on Application Pools. In the resulting menu, click Add Application Pool.
In the resulting window, enter a name for the pool (e.g. MainBoss). The .NET Framework version should be the highest available and the managed pipeline mode should be Integrated (or Classical if you make that security choice). When you click OK, the pool will be created, using default settings.
The new pool is automatically given a default identity. Typically, this is either NetworkService or ApplicationPoolIdentity. If the default identity is not NetworkService, you must change the pool's identity to NetworkService by following these steps:

Right-click on the name of the pool in the list of application pools.

In the resulting menu, click Advanced Settings.

In the resulting window, click the entry for Identity (under Process Model).

Click the "..." button on the right-hand side of the field.

In the resulting window, click Built-in Account, drop the arrow, and select NetworkService from the list.

Keep clicking OK until you get back to the IIS manager.