The World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC) provides web connectivity and administration of websites through the IIS snap-in. This service provides HTTP services for applications that are running on the Windows operating system, and it contains a process manager and a configuration manager. The process manager controls the processes in which custom applications and simple websites reside. The configuration manager reads the stored computer configuration and ensures that Windows is configured to route HTTP requests to the appropriate application pools or operating system processes.
This service can monitor the processes that contain custom applications and provide recycling services for these applications. Recycling is a configuration property of an application pool, which can be based on memory limits, request limits, processing time, or time of day. The service queues HTTP requests if custom applications stop responding, and it attempts to restart custom applications.
You can configure the ports that are used by this service through the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager snap-in. If the administrative website is enabled, a virtual website is created that uses HTTP traffic on TCP port 8098.
The following table identifies the application protocol, network protocol, and ports used by the World Wide Web Publishing Service:
| Application protocol | Network protocol | Ports |
|---|---|---|
| HTTP | TCP | 80 |
| HTTPS | TCP | 443 |
This service is an optional component that can be installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 as part of the IIS Web Server package. If the World Wide Web Publishing Service stops, the operating system cannot serve any form of web request.
The World Wide Web Publishing Service is dependent upon the following system components:
- Windows Process Activation Service
- Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
- DCOM Server Process Launcher
- RPC Endpoint Mapper