Does Windows Azure support the Application Warm-Up module or something similar?

Question

We have a Web Role that we are hosting in Windows Azure that uses an old ASMX based Web Reference to contact an external system. The Web Reference proxy code is big enough that instantiating it the first time has a significant cost.

We'd like to be able to have this run when the Web Role starts instead of on the first request.

I know IIS 7.5 has an Application Warm-Up module that would allow us to achieve this, but I'm having trouble figuring out if something similar exists with hosting on Windows Azure.

Thanks, Corey

Answer 1

I like the solution from Steve Marx.

Add this lines to ServiceDefinition.csdef:

<Startup>
  <Task commandLine="startup\disableTimeout.cmd" executionContext="elevated" />
</Startup>

And add disableTimeout.cmd in a folder called startup, with the following line of code:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:applicationPools -applicationPoolDefaults.processModel.idleTimeout:00:00:00

Original solution from here: http://blog.smarx.com/posts/controlling-application-pool-idle-timeouts-in-windows-azure

When running in the emulator please read this: http://blog.smarx.com/posts/skipping-windows-azure-startup-tasks-when-running-in-the-emulator

Answer 2

It looks like the Application_Start handler in Global.asax gets executed when the Web Role is deployed (for ASP.NET) and not on the first request, so that will work for us.