You don't mention which version of IIS and ASP you're using. I'm going to guess it's IIS 5 on Windows 2000, using ASP 3.0. If that's the case, the answer to your question, "Is there anything like SQL Profiler that can track issues on an IIS server?" is "No." ASP.NET does include something similar and exposes detailed information about requests through a virtual file called trace.axd.
Issues with ASP 3.0 queuing are actually quite difficult for the system administrator to troubleshoot -- you'll need some help from the developer, and your message states that they're not willing to help. You can use the performance tool (perfmon) to better track the ASP queuing, and it might give you a clue as to the source of the problem. Perfmon also exposes information about the connection pool to the database, which is a common problem with database-driven ASP applications. There's also a great deal of SQL information available in perfmon, and analyzing it may lead you to conclude that the problem is occurring in the database. It's entirely possible that there's contention between requests in your SQL database that are causing the ASP requests to become stopped up -- especially considering you have four Web servers pointed at the database. If the application wasn't designed for this architecture, queuing could occur because multiple ASP servers attempt to lock the same database resource.
One other possible source comes to mind, and that's hardware limitations. None of your IIS servers or your SQL server are experiencing high processor utilization, correct? That's a possible cause of the queuing, but not a common one.
Good luck. I certainly wish I could give you a more direct answer, but I hope I've at least got you going in the right direction.
This was first published in March 2003
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