Hi Jenna... I completely understand your frustration, because I feel the same way. I don't think the default settings are a wise decision on Microsoft's part. Just to give you (and others) some history, I tried the PageBlaster solution from snapsis.com... it was a cool idea, but I ran into many issues with it not updating its content right there and then, which drove my users nuts. People were making changes to the site which reflected when they were logged in, but those changes weren't being reflected on the site for all other anonymous users. It only updated its cache when it felt like it. I also tried (and am still using) the keepalive ping solution from host-tracker.com. That's a great service, but unfortunately this service alone does not keep my apps running. All this does is tell me if my site is up or down, and what kind of uptime I'm looking at. It's worth it for this alone... So I had to come up with another solution. Lucky for me, I host my own server, so poking around the IIS6 app pools, I found my solution:
DNNAppPool -> Properties -> Performance Tab -> Shutdown Worker Processes after being idle for (time in minutes).
It was set to 20 minutes. I changed it to 1440 minutes. So, if in 24hrs, there's no activity (highly unlikely), it'll recycle that app pool and shut it down. I also have the option of turning it off completely, but I'll do that if this doesn't seem to work out... but I'm not seeing any indication that this solution isn't working. I've been trying all throughout the day/night these past couple of weeks to check out the various sites I'm hosting, and they're all coming up very fast. So I'm thinking this is the fix to this issue. :)
Hope this helps!
Cya,
Mike