Application Pools not starting after iisreset

Question

Before I start, I know using iisreset is considered bad practice, but this shouldn't happen anyway..

What we have:

• Several machines with IIS6 on Windows Server 2003 R2 (both 64 and 32 bits)

• Several WCF webservices (.NET runtime 2.0) deployed in several applications, each with it's own application pool, each application pool running under an other windows account.

What happens:

• All appPools are started, all services operational
• IISReset is executed (or the machine is rebooted)
• IIS comes back up, but not all application pools start properly. Sometimes they all come back up, sometimes one or more pools won't start. They can be started manually however.

Is this "normal" iis behavior and should I just avoid using iisreset, or are we doing something wrong in our .NET code?

Answer 1

Reason:

IIS does not immediately start ASP.NET worker processes (w3wp.exe) until the first request comes in. When it says "not started" it mean you attempt to access some WCF web services (after iisreset) failed due to object was holding some space in memory, and you get a Service Unavailable error because the appPool cannot be started.

Workaround:

Create Batch file with following commands & schedule it.

net stop 23svc

net stop msftpsvc

net stop smtpsvc

net stop PleskControlPanel

net stop HTTPFilter

iisreset /restart

net start w3svc

net start msftpsvc

net start smtpsvc

net start PleskControlPanel

net Start HTTPFilter