Difference between IISRESET and IIS Stop-Start command

Question

Is there any difference between commands iisreset and iisreset /stop followed by iisreset /start ?

Answer 1

Take IISReset as a suite of commands that helps you manage IIS start / stop etc.

Which means you need to specify option (/switch) what you want to do to carry any operation.

Default behavior OR default switch is /restart with iisreset so you do not need to run command twice with /start and /stop.

Hope this clarifies your question. For reference the output of iisreset /? is:

IISRESET.EXE (c) Microsoft Corp. 1998-2005  Usage: iisreset [computername]      /RESTART            Stop and then restart all Internet services.     /START              Start all Internet services.     /STOP               Stop all Internet services.     /REBOOT             Reboot the computer.     /REBOOTONERROR      Reboot the computer if an error occurs when starting,                         stopping, or restarting Internet services.     /NOFORCE            Do not forcefully terminate Internet services if                         attempting to stop them gracefully fails.     /TIMEOUT:val        Specify the timeout value ( in seconds ) to wait for                         a successful stop of Internet services. On expiration                         of this timeout the computer can be rebooted if                         the /REBOOTONERROR parameter is specified.                         The default value is 20s for restart, 60s for stop,                         and 0s for reboot.     /STATUS             Display the status of all Internet services.     /ENABLE             Enable restarting of Internet Services                         on the local system.     /DISABLE            Disable restarting of Internet Services                         on the local system. 

Answer 2

The following was tested for IIS 8.5 and Windows 8.1.

As of IIS 7, Windows recommends restarting IIS via net stop/start. Via the command prompt (as Administrator):

> net stop WAS > net start W3SVC 

net stop WAS will stop W3SVC as well. Then when starting, net start W3SVC will start WAS as a dependency.