Change from multiple Sharepoint 2010 Service Application pools to a single application pool

Question

My current farm(meduim) have all Service Applications in separate app pools and accounts. But we are planning to split and configure all service application under a single application pool.

Please tell me the impact of this change.

Answer 1

Consolidating your service applications pool into a single one will impact your farm, no doubt about it, but both in positive and negative ways.

Let's start with the bad ones...

• You will not have process isolation.
• For instance the SSO service should have it's own process for security reasons
• If one service app dies/crashes, all of your service apps will
• You don't have a granular way to set permissions on the different service apps
• You will need to revisit your SLA's

And now the good ones..

• You will consume less memory with fewer application pools, thus impacting performance
• It is far easier to manage

So a single one might not be ideal, except in development environments, but keep it as few as possible to live up to SLA's and security levels.

There are probably tons of more of both pros and cons (if you got a few add them as comments and I'll update this answer - all for the sake of the community :-)