Super-Networking Blog

Ran across something interesting this week. I was looking into performance on some of our webservers and noticed that there would be unexplained CPU spikes every once in a while. No real spikes in traffic, no additional tasks going on.

In the event logs I did find something that correlated with the CPU spikes:

Event ID: 7036

“The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the running state.”

Event ID: 7036

“The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the stopped state.”

This happens many times a day, starting and stopping. When in transition it seemed to spike the CPU for a little while.

Service Description is the following:

Implements the Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) protocol for Windows HTTP Services (WinHTTP). WPAD is a protocol to enable an HTTP client to automatically discover a proxy configuration. If this service is stopped or disabled, the WPAD protocol will be executed within the HTTP client’s process instead of an external service process; there would be no loss of functionality as a result.

In looking into this more I found this is not needed to run IIS or anything else on your server. Only needed for your browser on your server to detect a proxy for Internet browsing. So do yourself a favor and disable this service, you will see it most likely set as manual and stopped but don’t let this fool you. Check out your event logs and if you see it starting and stopping disable it.

So if you are running Windows 2003 with IIS 6 and all of your web applications are running ASP .Net 2.0 you might want to get rid of .Net 1.1.

Well with Windows 2003 it isn’t easy or advisable to completely remove .Net 1.1 but you can unregister is from IIS having the same affect as far as your websites are concerned.

You need to open up the command prompt and go to the path .Net is installed in. Typically is C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\

If you have other versions of .net installed you will see all the versions under Framework as well, be sure to go into the 1.1 directory.

From the command prompt in that directory type the command “aspnet_regiis.exe -u”

This will unregister this version of the framework with IIS and in turn IIS will not see it. You will want to do a reboot to make sure everything comes up clean afterwards.

Also make sure that you do not have any websites using .Net 1.1 because you will most likely mess it up when it is forced over to .Net 2.0