Process Isolation

You may have heard of this term in one of the conferences or tech talks. If you have worked with ArcGIS Server, you probably have seen the option to use High Process Isolation vs Low Process Isolation when configuring the GIS instances. So what does this mean and why does is it important to isolate processes?

So when we say "Isolate", we get a general idea of what that might be. To keep processes separate from each other. So you would think that one advantage of process isolation is to protect the process data from being accessed by other processes, and that is correct. But is that all?

Let's say you want to write a program to implement two functionalities (A and B).  Functionality A is low intensive (perhaps its just printing the result or updating the UI) and B is high intensive (querying the database, processing, rendering  etc..). So one approach is to write code to implement both A and B in one application.  Both Code A and B will be running in one process. 

Another approach is write the Code for A and the Code for B and use Process.Start() to execute code A in one process and code B in another process. Here is where the processes are isolated. 

In the first approach if both A and B runs in the same process, you risk B eating on your memory. If anything goes wrong in code B and it crashes, the entire process will crash taking code A down with it and users will lose your application entirely. However in the second approach, if B crashes, A will still be running and it can easily relaunch B, resurrect it back to life.

-Hussein