Problems with disabling IIS shutdown of idle worker process?

Question

I ran into an issue with an IIS web app shutting down an idle worker process! The next request would then have to re-initialize the application, leading to delays.

I disabled the IIS shutdown of idle worker processes on the application pool to resolve this. Are there any issues associated with turning this off? If the process is leaking memory, I imagine it is nice to recycle the process every now and then.

Are there any other benefits to having this process shutdown?

Answer 1

I'm assuming that you're referring to IIS 6.

Instead of disabling shutdown altogether, maybe you can just increase the amount of time it waits before killing the process. The server is essentially conserving resources - if your server can stand the resource allocation for a process that mostly sits around doing nothing, then there isn't any harm in letting it be.

As you mentioned, setting the auto-recycling of the process on a memory limit would be a good idea, if the possibility of a memory leak is there.