explanation of ASP.NET Apps v1.1.4322 Anonymous Requests object in permon

Question

Can someone please tell me more about performance monitor object ASP.NET Apps v1.1.4322 Anonymous Requests - defined as The number of requests that use anonymous authentication.

Running Windows server 2003 standard and iis6

Is this a real time count or a total?
What does it represent? individual Request from say a browser to the web app? Is this somehow related to "Current Anonymous Users" in the "Web Service" perfmon object?

I am trying to understand why it keeps growing with time in a web application.

Thanks!

Answer 1

it is a sum of all the anonymous requests that have been made to your site. Which is why it grows.

It is only partially related to Anonymous user in that an anonymous user will make anonymous requests.

Bear in mind that a single "page request" might result in being counted as more than one request. For example, let's say your page has 3 images on it, and 2 javascript files. This would be 6 requests: one for the page, one for each image (3), and one for each javascript file (2): 1+3+2 = 6.

The first time that page is hit, the request total is 6. The second time, the total is now 12. and so on.

update
One little note: The terminology MS uses might be a bit confusing. With regards to "Current Anonymous Users", IIS 6 counts each request as a different "user". As stated above a real user loading a single page in their browser might be counted as multiple "users" from IIS's perspective.

Also, anonymous is another term that might be tricky. If you are using anonymous authentication for the worker process while rolling your own login system, which is common, then every request will appear to be anonymous.