Why Even Recycle an Application Pool?

Question

Maybe someone can shed some light on this simple question:

I have a .NET web application that has been thoroughly vetted. It loads a cache per appdomain (process) whenever one starts and can not fully reply to requests until it completes this cache loading.

I have been examining the settings on my application pools and have started wondering why I was even recycling so often (once every 1,000,000 calls or 2 hours).

What would prevent me from setting auto-recycles to being once every 24 hours or even longer? Why not completely remove the option and just recycle if memory spins out of control for the appdomain?

Answer 1

If your application runs reliably for longer then the threshold set for app pool recycling, then by all means increase the threshold. There is no downside if your app is stable.

For us, we have recycling turned off altogether, and instead have a task that loads a test page every minute and runs an iisreset if it fails to load five times in a row.