IIS: RPS suddendly drops to zero while serving static files

Problem: while running tests on an IIS web site, RPS dropped to zero, then came back up, etc.

Solution: NTFS may be causing disk I/O to be the bottleneck by logging reads to those static files. Try setting

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate

to 1 (DWORD), reboot (not sure which services need to be restarted for avoiding a reboot...), and try.

More details here.