Wow. that's the first time I've heard that explanation. I've been researching this issue for sometime because it's a problem with my website. I am hosting an e-commerce solution with dotnetnuke and it's not a good first impression for shoppers to have to wait for the site to startup.

Could you please elaborate on how inactivity causes ASP.NET to recycle?

TIA,

ChrisG

chrisg,

Sorry for the delayed response, the e-mail notification on this reply must have gotten lost in my inbox...(I respond to a lot of posts out here).

By default ASP.NET will shut down the ASP.NET Worker Process after 20 minutes of inactivity.  There are a few things that can be done to prevent this.

1.) If you have access to the hosting server you can modify the inactive timeout value

2.) You can use a service such as http://www.host-tracker.com to request a page from your site every 15 minutes which will keep the site active

---

-Mitchel Sellers
Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, DNN MVP
CEO/Director of Development - IowaComputerGurus Inc.


Visit mitchelsellers.com for my mostly DNN Blog and support forum.

Visit IowaComputerGurus.com for free DNN Modules, DNN Performance Tips, DNN Consulting Quotes, and DNN Technical Support Services

Here is a possible explanation for the frequent recycling of the app pool, (which in our view is causing more issues than the original problem)

from Scott Forsyth's Blog

"While troubleshooting an unrelated issue on a v2.0 site yesterday, I noticed that there was an AppDomain restart simply by creating a non-application folder. Through further testing I found that adding folders, deleting folders and renaming folders caused the AppDomain recycle. Furthermore, if many dozen files were added in short succession to each other, that would also case the same restart. Of course the app_{folders} will cause a restart, and that makes sense, but completely non-application related folders also cause this same behavior.

It turns out that this was a purposeful change with v2.0 and was done so that stale content doesn't remain in place after a significant change. I guess there were enough situations where that happened that they changed the situations that caused an AppDomain recycle to be far more aggressive than v1.x of the framework."

link: http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2006/02/21/ASP.NET-v2.0-_2D00_-AppDomain-recycles_2C00_-more-common-than-before.aspx

Note: this is quite old so I am surprised that it is only recently that I have noticed DotNetNuke recycling every 10 minutes or so, we also use a keep alive utility accessing thne site every 9 minutes but this does not prevent the frequent recycling. 

Regards

Craig

---

Craig Hubbard TechnicaOne Business Solutions - Australia