How to diagnose IIS fatal communication error problem

Question

I've a a customer using IIS and an application, developed by us, in ASP.NET 1.1. Monday, for 4 times in a row the following error has appeared:

A process serving application pool 'xxxx' suffered a fatal communication error with the World Wide Web Publishing Service. The process id was 'yyyy'. The data field contains the error number.

Any idea about how to diagnose this? The only link I've found talks about installing low level debug tools but before proceeding in this kind of low level analysis I would know if someone has a better idea or a suitable alternative.

The problem (from what I can see) is something in the customer environment, because the same application it's installed at other customer sites on at least 20 or 30 different servers and the problem do not happen.

Answer 1

Had the same issue on IIS 7, had few reports all worked except one report that was very long and it never worked on IIS7 (it was fine on low spec server).

on IIS7 in application pool's Advance Setting I set "Enable 32-Bit Application" to true and all worked nicely

Answer 2

I'm getting the same error, here are some more details:

running: Windows Server 2003, IIS 6.0 / ASP 3.0, 2.13 GHz, 1 GB ram

My web site is in Beta, so I hardly have any visitors to the site.

According to the event viewer I'm getting this warning 3 times every 3 minutes, then it stops for a few hours.

Then sometimes I get the error:

A process serving application pool 'DefaultAppPool' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '3900'. The process exit code was '0x800703e9'.

which follow by:

Application pool 'DefaultAppPool' is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.

Which then causes a 'Service Unavailable' message when browsing to the website.

after reading too many post about this issue, I did the following steps:

1. I read that it might be registry access right, so I installed a monitor and trace all the W3SVC Access Denied errors and grant permition

2. I read that the 0x800703e9 error means stack over flow which causes a w3wp.exe crash and I should install a Debug tool and try to get a memory dump. I did that but I didn't get any dump, so I installed a new debugging tool, but didn't got a crash yet.

My web site is doing some data mining which keeps the server busy.

Conclusion:

1. I don't know what is going on there... but I do know that my server machine is way to slow on resource, so I'm going to upgrade and reinstall it, I'm certain that it will solve the problem...

2. The problem happens all the time, even when my .net code is idle, therefore it is a problem in the server, and not in my code.

3. I think that the first warnning “A process serving application pool ..." happens every some time, and every now and then it causes the Application Pool to restart, therefore a attaching a debugger doesn't help - the process keeps restarting and the debugger is not effective any longer... I think that the 0x800703e9 error (which causes the Service Unavailable) maybe happens when the app pool restart, I guess that it needs a lot of resource and since my machine is too slow it gets the 0x800703e9 ... as said before this is a stack over flow, but I think that it is caused by low resource and not by an endless recursion.

4. I think that the 'registry access right' which is claimed by Microsoft to be the issue, is nonsense, but I didn't got 'Service Unavailable' since so it might helped (thought I still get the warnning “A process serving application pool ..." ).

Hope this help someone...

Answer 3

I'm sure you already know this, but the App Pool contains 1.1 applications only right? I don't remember the error you get when the pool dies by trying to mix frameworks (something like Server Unavailable), but it's more common then I thought in the wild so I would double check.

While not likely the case, it's somewhere to start.

Edit: This KB article also had the error message you described relating to registry permissions, what version of IIS is the client running?