Hey all,

I'm looking for info about implementing mass shared hosting of ASP.NET content.  While there is good documentation about configuring IIS6.0 for mass hosting of static content, I have a lot of unanswered questions about ASP.NET.

We run a web farm, with load-balanced servers accessing content on a centralized UNC filer.  Because the number of sites is so wide, we disable as much caching as we can (the cache hit rate is minimal).  This brings up a lot of questions about caching in ASP.NET:

1. Can we prevent ASP.NET from caching compiled ASPX assemblies on disk?  (Otherwise the temp compilation directory on each server would quickly fill up.)
   
1. Since you can disable caching for ASP pages -- can the same be done for ASPX?
   
2. If not, can the temporary compilation directory be set to shared a UNC path?  Can multiple servers in a web farm share compiled assemblies?
3. Can we prevent ASP.NET from caching ASPX assemblies in memory?  Or do we just have to rely on the AppDomains constantly recycling after they have loaded hundreds of assemblies?
   
4. Since IIS6 defaults to last-modified time checking for UNC content, does that work correctly with ASP.NET?
1. Since there are no file-changed notifications, does ASP.NET know when the source needs to be recompiled?
2. Does it know when web.config files have changed?
3. Because ASP.NET listens to a lot of file-based events (files changing, folders renaming, etc.), I just want to make sure last-modified checking is kosher. :)
   
5. Out of curiosity: is last-modified the default for ALL content in IIS6.0, or only UNC content?

There are many more questions, but answers to those would be a great start.

Thanks!

Did you ever get any answers to these questions? 

 I have a scenario where I am serving asp.net pages from a fileshare (on a SAN) providing content to multiple web servers.  I am getting the infamous "Netbios command limit reached" error after visiting only about 25-50 pages in the application.  This is because of the overhead of IIS setting up file change notifications (I believe) to see if any of the pages that are being served need to be recompiled from that point forward as users hit the site.

I have searched around for best practices and the best I can find mention tweaking several registry settings on the IIS box and the file server.  Even with these solutions it points out that on a 32bit platform your constrained by nonpaged pool memory (limited to 256MB instead of the 64bit platforms 128GB).  When you raise the registry settings the server can become unstable if you push the values to very high values.

 As you mention above IIS6 is supposed to use "last-modified time checking for UNC Content" and I've verified I have not set any of the registry settings which would enable File-Change Notifications.

 Isn't this a huge detriment to the scalability of IIS6/WIN32 hosting asp.net pages in a distributed environment? (Read: almost impossible for a host with thousands of customers?)

If anyone has any insight on this please advise.