I'm not on my own server, not being rich or corporate, which is why I use the Community edition -- neither rich nor corporate.  Are you telling me there is NO WAY to keep this thing alive internally? Like with a setting in web.config such as this:

   add key="UseAppKeepAlive" value="true"
   add key="AppKeepAliveUrl" value="http://dnn.crypticsites.net/home.aspx"

(isn't there anyway in this editor to do a blockquote??)

You're kidding, right?  I find that impossible to believe, that an app this advanced wouldn't have SOME means of internal keep-alive. 

And what about that KeepAlive.aspx?  Is that just useless?  It does nothing?  Then why is it included, if it does nothing?  I figured it must do or be able to do something, if it's "called" properly, but not being a programmer, I have no earthly idea how to "call" it to do anything.

I'm looking into this "mon.itor.us" business, but I've never heard of it, don't know how it works, and I don't see any instructions about its use on its outside pages; do they provide any instructions after you actually sign up?

Shock, dismay, disappointment, disbelief...
Andria

Firstly, tony are you serious, I dont know what 'dnn' sites you are visiting but do you know how long 40 seconds is?
Any site that takes 40 seconds to respond has some serious issues in areas other than its choice of cms  - and Ive never seen dotnetnuke.com take that long to respond.

Memory in particular is the MOST important factor in overall performance of most asp.net hostings - especially if you have MS SQL on the same server.   MS-SQL on a large site expects 2gig of ram, and you should allow 1gig per application pool where that is feasible.  So a starting point of 4gig is the ideal sweet spot.

There are a whole lot of reasons why dnn does not have any form of built in keepalive.  But firstly its important to understand why it happens.
All asp.net applications run in an application thread on your server and while running consume system resources - to ensure that IIS - the web server  - is able to best deliver resources to the highest number of hosting sites at any given time ... a mechanism is need to turn off application threads that are not being used ... freeing up space for other hostings.

Now if you are running on your OWN dedicated server and DNN is the only application running on that IIS server you can quite happily turn off the application pool recycling system ... and let your application run continually .... though there are some strong arguments to suggest that you should still allow the application to recycle regularly to keep the memory pool clean etc etc.

On the other hand however, IF you are running on someone else's hosting - say a shared hosting - then the amount of resources available have to be shared amongst all the applications hosted on that server.  Those resources include processing and memory.  So in those cases your hosting application is going to be closed after normally 20minutes of no activity,

Because lets face it - many sites only get a couple of hits a day - and thats just a huge waste of server resources to keep that application running for the rest of the day.

So out of the BOX dnn does not include any features that would keep this application pool alive since it would potentially lead to huge issues with all the shared hosting companies basically not wanting to host a resource hungry platform.

The second issue actually relates to how you actually keep a site alive - the way this is done is by making a request to load any page on the site.  So to start a site application that is not running you need some 3rd party tool - NOT the site itself to make a call to the site.  As such it is not possible for DNN or any other asp.net application to boot start itself.    Yes it is possible to run a worker/background thread once the application starts to possibly retrigger itself - but depending on how the server recycles the application pool this background thread may also be recycled,  Resulting in both the main thread and the worker background thread also being terminated at the same time.

So if you want your site to keep alive you need a 3rd party tool to make it happen - this can be a site monitoring tool either running on your own server - or on a 3rd party server =  and really thats the best place for it to be running - somewhere else - because you also get the benefit of reporting on uptimes and such.

 The KeepAlive,aspx file is there so that people using 3rd party monitoring systems have a target to call.   

Basically you register with the monitoring site - and use http:///www.mysite.com/keepalive.aspx as the url you would like them to monitor.
Once active they check your site site ever 15 minutes as a rule by calling that url to confirm that they get a response.
If they don't get a response they send you an email -  if they do get a response your site have been kept alive for the next 15mins and give most application pools recycle every 20mins your site will always be alive.

PS   -  hostings like powerdnn provide keep alive services to all their hosting clients if i recall.

If you look on www.snowcovered.com there are a couple of keepalive tools - however most require that you install them on a computer you have full access too - as opposed to running on your shared hosting web server.  This means any computer that has continual access to the internet that you have permission to run a windows installer on.   The applications are installed as a windows service and run in background - pinging you web server on a regular basis.  

The other option is a 3rd party site monitoring web site - there are any number of them on the internet - some free - some for a fee.

I would personally avoid any keep alive tool that claims to run on your existing shared hosting .. as it will only really ever do half the job.

Regards

Wes Tatters