What is the role of the ASP.NET worker process? What is aspnet_wp.exe?

Answer:

For faster execution of ASP.NET applications that are primarily based to be hosted on IIS server, the aspnet_wp.exe comes into picture. This file (aspnet_wp.exe) is actually the ASP.NET worker process. The worker process is introduced to actually share the load on the IIS, so that application domains and other services may be maintained by a single worker process.

The aspnet_wp.exe worker process is a part of the Microsoft ASP.NET framework and it is responsible for most of the technical processes in the ASP.NET framework. There may be multiple instances of ASP.NET worker process running on IIS 6 depending on multiple application pools. The worker process handles all the requests passed to the ASP.NET framework, so we can say that it’s actually the main engine that handles all requests pertaining to ASP.NET. For example, when a request for an .aspx page is received by the IIS server, the dll called aspnet_isapi.dll passes this request to the aspnet_wp.exe worker process.