What exactly is an application pool? What is its purpose?
An application pool is a group of one or more URLs that are served by a worker process or set of worker processes. Application pools are used to separate sets of IIS worker processes that share the same configuration and application boundaries. Application pools are used to isolate our web application for better security, reliability, availability and performance, and they keep running without impacting each other.
The application Pools element contains configuration settings for all application pools running on your IIS. An application pool defines a group of one or more worker processes, configured with common settings that serve requests to one or more applications that are assigned to that application pool.
Because application pools allow a set of Web applications to share one or more similarly configured worker processes, they provide a convenient way to isolate a set of Web applications from other Web applications on the server computer.
Process boundaries separate each worker process; therefore, application problems in one application pool do not affect Web sites or applications in other application pools. Application pools significantly increase both the reliability and manageability of your Web infrastructure.
Application pools are used to separate set of IIS worker processes that share the same configuration. Application pools enable us to isolate our web application for better security, reliability, and availability
An Application pool is a collection of applications which uses the same worker process of IIS (w3wp.exe). Primary concern of using Application pool is to isolate two different applications with different security concerns and also to avoid crashing of applications due to worker process death.
Basically, an application pool is a way to create compartments in a web server through process boundaries, and route sets of URLs to each of these compartments. See more info here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc735247(WS.10).aspx
Application pools are used to separate sets of IIS worker processes that share the same configuration and application boundaries.
Application pools used to isolate our web application for better security, reliability, and availability and performance and keep running without impacting each other . The worker process serves as the process boundary that separates each application pool so that when one worker process or application is having an issue or recycles, other applications or worker processes are not affected. One Application Pool can have multiple worker process Also.
Or we can simply say that, An application pool is a group of one or more URLs that are served by a worker process or set of worker processes. Any Web directory or virtual directory can be assigned to an application pool. So that one website cannot be affected by other, if u used separated application pool.
Source : Interviewwiz