Application Center 2000 does not perform as well on Windows Server 2003 when Request Forwarding is turned on

Performance of Microsoft Application Center 2000 on a Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based system is not as good when the Request Forwarding (RfFiltExt) ISAPI filter is loaded as when the filter is removed. HTTP.sys is not caching Web pages.

Windows Server 2003 introduces a new kernel-mode driver, HTTP protocol stack (HTTP.sys), for HTTP parsing and caching. This driver provides increased scalability and performance. However, caching will be disabled when an ISAPI filter is installed that is not cache-aware. The Application Center 2000 Request Forwarding filter has not been tested for use with caching. Therefore, this filter is installed with caching disabled. This behavior causes all caching to be disabled.

To resolve this problem, consider removing Request Forwarding if you do not use it. For more information about how to remove request forwarding to improve performance, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Application Center 2000 on Windows Server 2003 when using the Request Forwarding filter.