hot-deployments with Self Host Web Api Services

Question

Context: My company has been developing a WebAPI application to be hosted by IIS and the request latencies for a single static content file are about ~60ms. We investigated benchmarking the same app using WebAPI Self host and the latencies for the same content file were ~15ms, which really blew us away.

From a deployment process, we love IIS as it provides us extreme flexibility in doing hot deployments by copying DLLs directly to our web servers, which doesn't require us to do any sort of drain-stopping.

Question: Is it feasible to do similar hot deployments (just copying over dll's) with self hosted applications?

Answer 1

Nope, while self-host is executing, the DLLs will be locked so you'll have to stop the self-host first. You can do other tricks like deploying to another folder and then re-routing requests etc. but it's not the same as IIS deployment.