IIS 5.X Process Model

This is the default process model available on Windows 2000 and XP machines. As mentioned it consists in the IIS inetinfo.exe process listening by default on the TCP port 80 for incoming HTTP requests and queuing them into a single queue, waiting to be processed. If the request is specific to ASP.NET, the processing is delegated to the ASP.NET ISAPI extension, aspnet_isapi.dll. This, in turn, communicates with the ASP.NET worker process, aspnet_wp.exe via named pipes and finally is the worker process which takes care of delivering the request to the ASP.NET HTTP runtime environment.
Therefore all ASP.NET web applications hosted on IIS are actually hosted inside the worker process, too. However, this doesn’t mean that all the applications are run under the same context and share all their data. As mentioned, ASP.NET introduces the concept of AppDomain, which is essentially a sort of managed lightweight process which provides isolation and security boundaries. Each IIS virtual directory is executed in a single AppDomain, which is loaded automatically into the worker process whenever a resource belonging to that application is requested for the first time. Once the AppDomain is loaded – that is, all the assemblies required to satisfy that request are loaded into the AppDomain – the control is actually passed to the ASP.NET pipeline for the actual processing. Multiple AppDomains can thus run under the same process, while requests for the same AppDomain can be served by multiple threads. However, a thread doesn’t belong to an AppDomain and can serve requests for different AppDomains, but at a given time a thread belongs to a single AppDomain.

Reference: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/iis/ASPNETInternalsIISAndTheProcessModel.aspx