Knowledge Base

Profiling a web application hosted in IIS on a fixed TCP port

Category: How do I?
Date: 17 Jun 2009
Product: ANTS Profiler
Versions: 1-4

Some web applications contain code which forces the application to use a certain TCP port. Since ANTS Profiler may create a copy of your web application that answers on TCP port 8013, this may require some additional configuration in order to profile the web application.

ANTS Profiler can profile web applications hosted in IIS. The method for doing this varies on the version of IIS hosting the web application. In IIS 5, there are no special requirements to profile a web application. ANTS Profiler can be started and given the address of the web application and it will be profiled as it runs in IIS. This is also true for IIS 6 websites configured to use the IIS version 5.0 isolation mode.

IIS version 6 native worker process isolation mode requires a different profiling method, however. Normally, ANTS Profiler would insist that you specify an unused port to run the website. This is because ANTS Profiler starts an IIS worker process (w3wp.exe) outside of IIS. The data and configuration from the web application specified in the path setting of ANTS Profiler is loaded into this worker process by IIS and run outside of IIS. Since IIS is already servicing the web application natively, its' usual TCP port is still in use.

If the web application needs to listen on the TCP port configured in IIS, either because of a hard-coded configuration or other design consideration, it is possible to make ANTS Profiler launch an IIS worker process on the normal port. First, start the IIS Administration tool, locate the website that you want to profile, and click the stop button. Next, launch ANTS Profiler and go through the project wizard following the steps to profile an ASP .NET web application hosted in IIS. In the path to the web application, enter the URL of the web application, including the TCP port that you need it to answer on, for instance:

http://MyServer:1234/

After verifying that the correct versions of the .NET Framework and IIS appear on this page, changing them if necessary, enter the required port number in the Port textbox.

This will start a copy of your web application that will listen on the same port that it normally run on in IIS.