Windows XP Pro and IIS 6 Limitation as a Web Server

Recently, a server of our client was crashed due to an infection.  It is a Window$ 2003 Server.  We had to put the website back to the Internet as fast as possible.  To save time, we decided to set up the temporary website on a Windows XP Pro machine available at that time.  And this was our wrong decision.

After we had finished set up this temporary server on Windows XP Pro.  We made the website went LIVE.  Just a few minutes after, we then tried to browse the website.  What we saw is the website with a number of missing images.  And if we used 2 (or more) browsers to access the website at the same time (or almost the same time), we will get HTTP 403.9 error (Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected Internet Information Services).

This fucked us up (although everything had already been fucked up by the infected server).
Fortunately, we found this article:

http://weblogs.asp.net/cazzu/archive/2003/10/10/31476.aspx

In summary, IIS on Windows XP Pro, by default, it can accept only 10 connections at the same time.  However, there is a trick by running:

c:\inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil set w3svc/MaxConnections 40

which will make IIS on XP Pro passes its limitation.  It can now accept 40 connections at the same time (but unfortunately 40 is the limit).

This saved us for a few hours and then we set up a new machine with Windows 2003 to solve the problem for real.

Note that a normal web browser when we use it to browse a webpage, it will create multiple connections to get several parts of the webpage in parallel which means 1 browser may create 2 (or more) connections to the webserver.

Window$ Bastards!