I had a need to consolidate application pools for several MOSS 2007 sites I had created on my development machine. I had been so stupid that I just created a new application pool each time I created a site. Since Sharepoint Search crawls every site, a new work process (w3wp.exe) was created for each site – even though I didn’t use them. No need to say that this eats valuable memory in my VPC…
This was what I did:
- Make sure all sites use the same application pool acount in Central Administation > Operations > Service Accounts. I use Network Service for simplicity
- Make sure authentication providers use NTLM in Central Administration > Application Management > Authentication Providers
- Do a IISRESET and test that all sites works OK. If something doesn’t work now, it’s easy to go back if you remembered to make a note of previous settings for the first two steps
- Go to IIS Manager
- Create a new Application Pool:
- Call it something reasonable, like “Sharepoint Shared App Pool”
- Set Identity to the same identity as you used in the first step
- Configure Application Pool for each web site under Web Sites that you want to colsolidate
- Right click root of web site and select Properties
- Under Home Directory, change Application pool to the newly created application pool
- Expand the _layouts-folder under root and change the application pool for both images and inc
- Do a IISRESET and test that all sites works OK
- Delete the application pools you no longer use (when testet that everything works ok!)
