MTX and Components

Microsoft Transaction Server (MTX) is a tool included with IIS4 NT Option Pack.  It is an essential long term ingredient to scalable, maintainable, reliable websites. It is necessary for commerce or mission critical websites, though it helps improve performance on all websites as well.

Without involving MTX, every request to create an instance of a component (ala server.createobject) and destroy the instance of that component (ala set object=nothing) is sent directly to the component. IIS tends to cache objects so that when you destroy an instance, IIS probably will not remove it from memory so that the next creation attempt will be instant since it is already in memory. This is a direct violation of the DCOM rule that when there are  zero instances of a component in memory, the component is automatically removed from memory.

Any MTX aware component is now managed by MTX and the following benefits are available:

• MTX is managing the object so that it may unload or load instances as needed to improve performance.

• MTX objects need not run as the "standard ASP User". Components registered with MTX can impersonate a specific user.

The typical segments of code that would be unique to components managed by MTX would look like this:

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