IIS Web gardens and performance

Question

Is there any performance benefit in configuring web gardens in IIS?

Anyone have any real life examples?

Answer 1

Under most circumstances, there is very little benefit to setting up web gardens and can actually cause issues if your application uses session state. The initial request may have come into one worker process, but then the next request might come into another. Here is a reference:

The reference is specific to IIS6 but the concepts apply to IIS7 as well.

Edit:

Here is a good reference from Scott Forsyth's Blog about the use of web gardens and why you should not use them: http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2011/06/13/why-you-shouldn-t-use-web-gardens-in-iis-week-24.aspx