Scenario:

- Server is Windows 2003 Server, P3/800, 768MB RAM, 3x10K SCSI hard drives. Upgrading hardware or purchasing a new or separate server is not an option.

- Server is a lightly-loaded departmental file server, also running:

- One instance of SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition. This instance supports several research databases of up to 30 - 50 GB each.

- One instance of MSDE 2000 to support a very small ASP.NET application, data to max out at probably 20MB or less.

- IIS6, supporting the ASP.NET app

Issue: from time to time heavy research queries are run against the research databases. These can run for half an hour or longer and pin the server at 100% CPU utilization. I'm concerned that the ASP.NET app might time out while one of these queries is running.

What I'd like to do is:

- Set "priority" of IIS6 and the MSDE instance higher than the priority of the SQL Server Standard instance. This would hopefully "guarantee" quick response for the ASP.NET app, at the cost of (slightly) slowing down the heavy research queries.

I took a brief look in WS2003 MMC but couldn't see anywhere to set "priority" for services/processes. Can anyone offer any resources on this?