Web Garden in IIS.

A web garden is a scenario where a site is configured to run within multiple processes on a single server. You can still have multiple servers configured in a web farm, but the web garden reflects configuration of a specific individual server

When we are talking about requesting processing within IIS, Worker Process (w3wp.exe) takes care of all of these. Worker Process runs the ASP.NET application in IIS. All the ASP.NET functionality inside IIS runs under the scope of worker process. Worker Process is responsible for handling all kinds of request, response, session data, cache data. Application Pool is the container of worker process. Application pool is used to separate sets of IIS worker processes and enables a better security, reliability, and availability for any web application.

Now, by default, each and every Application pool contains a single worker process. Application which contains the multiple worker process is called “Web Garden”. Below is the typical diagram for a web garden application.

In the above diagram, you can see one of the applications containing the multiple worker processes, which is now a web garden.

So, a Web application hosted on multiple servers and access based on the load on servers is called Web Farms and when a single application pool contains multiple Worker processes, it is called a web garden.

By default a new application pool in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) will run in a single process on the server. There is an option though to change the Maximum Worker Processes value to a number higher than one. When this is done, multiple processes (w3wp.exe) will spin up and serve requests made to that single application pool.