IIS Application Pools and Auto-Started Web Applications
We had an issue at work last week where a web application was taking a little bit too long to start up, which was causing intermittent failures. We’d like the application to be always-running, so that this doesn’t happen.
This led to an investigation of the vagaries of IIS application pool configuration.
What does it mean when an application pool is displayed as ‘Started’?
In IIS Manager, under “Application Pools”, you’ll see in the Status column that your application pools are shown as “Started”. This doesn’t mean that there’s a worker application ready to accept requests (the value should probably be “Ready”).
The autoStart attribute
In the applicationpools/add node in applicationHost.config, there are two settings which might be of interest. The autoStart attribute corresponds to the “Start Automatically” property shown in the “Advanced Settings” dialog for the application pool.
This doesn’t actually start the application pool; it’s equivalent to the “Started” status discussed above. It (more-or-less) enables the application pool, so that it’s ready when IIS starts up.
The startMode attribute
The second interesting attribute in applicationpools/add is the startMode attribute. This doesn’t appear to be available in the IIS console, but you can set it from PowerShell:
$pool = Get-Item 'IIS:\AppPools\DefaultAppPool'
$pool.startMode = 'AlwaysRunning'
$pool | Set-Item
## Idle Timeout
IIS stops web worker processes when they’re idle, in order to save resources. This may cause problems if your application takes a while to start up, so we want to disable this as well:
$pool = Get-Item 'IIS:\AppPools\DefaultAppPool'
$pool.processModel.idleTimeout = [TimeSpan]::Zero
$pool | Set-Item
Also see “Configure Idle Time-out Settings for an Application Pool (IIS 7)”
Configuring recycling
The other problem that we had was that IIS recycles the application pool every 29 hours. We’d rather it recycled outside working hours, at a fixed time each day.
So, using the details from here:
$pool = Get-Item 'IIS:\AppPools\DefaultAppPool'
$pool.recycling.periodicRestart.time = [TimeSpan]::Zero
$pool | Set-Item
Clear-ItemProperty "IIS:\AppPools\$($pool.Name)" -Name recycling.periodicRestart.schedule
Set-ItemProperty "IIS:\AppPools\$($pool.Name)" `
-Name recycling.periodicRestart.schedule -Value @{value='02:00:00'}
…we can set the application pool to recycle at 2am.