When optimizing a BizTalk environment one thing you can do is change the value for the ‘maxConnections’ setting. As stated on the MSDN site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561380.aspx) this setting determines how many connections can be made to a specific IP address. The same article on MSDN also contains the following text:
“If the BizTalk Server computer is running ASP.NET 2.0 or later then you can set autoConfig=truein the processModel section of the Machine.config file to automatically configure the following settings to achieve optimal performance based on the machine configuration”
This totally contradicts the following statement in the best BizTalk book around:
“ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a self-tuning feature to counter this issue whereby it will set the maxConnection value to a sensible value. This only applies to HTTP or Web Service requests created within ASP.NET 2.0 not BizTalk, so the above still applies to BizTalk solutions.”
I have tested this on my development box and it turned out that the MSDN content is not correct. The ‘autoConfig’ setting does not apply to BizTalk.
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We need to clarify this in the documentation…it’s a bit confusing.
The BizTalk MSDN documentation is a bit misleading…the referenced section sub-topic is “ASP.NET settings that can impact HTTP or SOAP Adapter performance” and it states at the top of the sub-section “The following settings can be applied to an ASP.NET application that hosts a web application that the HTTP or SOAP adapter communicates with. These parameters are set in the web.config or machine.config files of the server hosting the web application.”
BUT then for some reason we state “If the BizTalk Server computer is running ASP.NET 2.0 or later then you can set autoConfig=true”. This is very confusing, as it should state “If the machine hosting the web services is running ASP.NET 2.0 or later…”.
We also have the topic in the BizTalk 2009 documentation “SOAP Adapter Configuration and Tuning Parameters” ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560822.aspx ), and I think we do a better job of documenting this as well in the Operations Guide under the topic “Setting SOAP and HTTP Adapter Concurrent Connections” ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc296870.aspx ).
Bottom line, I’ll open a doc bug to see if I can get this clarified on the page you referenced.
Thanks for catching this!