SignalR maxes out cpu on app pool recycle - asp.net

I have a website written in .Net 4.5, MVC 4, using SignalR 2.0.2 with the Redis backplane for load balancing. This also has a number of actions to return json to the app. It's set to pre-load and app pool set to always running. Hosted on Windows 2012, IIS 8, using AWS Redis ElastiCache.
I am saving the connection ids into my SQL database against the user on the OnConnected, OnReconnected, and clearing with OnDisconnected, but these all have try/catch just in case.
We have an iOS app written to connect via websockets. Unfortunately the app does not close off it's connections and creates them more often than needed.
The net effect is that the server can have 3000+ connections, but only a few hundred are real connections. This is not really an issue in itself, and will be fixed in the next app release.
The problem is when the code is updated or the app pool recycles (regular intervals) the CPU maxes out for a long time. I have not had this happen with any other website i have written, and this is the first SignalR site with so many connections, so i believe that the server is trying to gracefully handle all the connections.
The effect is that the whole website is unavailable. Doing an IISRESET fixes it, obviously. Does not matter if the system is running on 1 server or 2.
So, knowing that this version of SignalR does not support disconnecting clients from the server-side...
Does anyone know why this would happen?
Is there anything i can do about it, except for killing the website with iisreset?
If any more info is required, please ask.
Long time reader, first time poster.
Thanks

Related

ASP.NET Application Pool process often gets stuck

We have a webserver (WinSrv2019) running a few ASP.NET 4.8 websites with a huge traffic.
Each site is running in its personal 64-bit Application Pool (Integrated Pipeline), .NET CLR Version v4.0.
One of the websites gets stuck apparently and stops responding.
Sometimes it continues a few minutes, sometimes it can remain stucked for a hour.
During this period our inter-application logs are empty.
Moreover, IIS log that logs incoming requests is empty as well and incoming requests during this period aren't being logged.
On the client side browser doesn't get any error, but just continue waiting for response.
Since it happens with the single site only, we've excluded the option that the problem refers server hardware. The server resources usage aren't get over 50%
On the second hand we don't have idea what can cause Application Pool to get stuck in this way.
Please advice.
How we can investigate this issue?
Is there any tool allowing to "debug" what happens inside IIS on the low level?
Thanks in advance

Calling SqlConnection.ClearAllPools() in Application_Start & Application_End?

We are trying to diagnose an issue that occurred in our production environment last week. Long story short, the database connection pool seemed to be full of active connections from our ASP.NET 3.5 app that would not clear, even after restarting the application pool and IIS.
The senior DBA said that because the network connections occur at the operating system level, recycling the app and IIS did not sever the actual network connections, so SQL Server left the database connections to continue running, and our app was still unable to reach the database.
In looking up ways to force a database connection pool to reset, I found the static method SqlConnection.ClearAllPools(), with documentation explaining what it does, but little to nothing explaining when to call it. It seems like calling it at the beginning of Application_Start and the end of Application_End in my global.asax.cs is a good safety measure to protect the app from poisoned connection pools, though it would of course incur a performance hit on startup/shutdown times.
Is what I've described a good practice? Is there a better one? The goal is to allow a simple app restart to reset an app's mangled connection pool without having to restart the OS or the SQL Server service, which would affect many other apps.
Any guidance is much appreciated.
When a process dies, all network connection are always, always, always closed immediately. That's at the TCP level. Has nothing to do with ADO.NET and goes for all applications. Kill the browser, and all downloads stop. Kill the FTP client and all connections are closed immediately.
Also, the connection pool is per process. So clearing it when starting the app is useless because the pool is empty. Clearing it at shutdown is not necessary because all connections will (gracefully) shut down any moment.
Probably, your app is not returning connections to the pool. You must dispose of all connections after use in all cases. If you fail to do that, dangling connections will accumulate for an indefinite amount of time.
Clearing the pool does not free up dangling connections because those appear to be in use. How could ADO.NET tell that you'll never use them again? It can't.
Look at sys.dm_exec_connections to see who is holding connections open. You might increase the ADO.NET pool size as a stop-gap measure. SQL Server can take over 30k connections per instance. You'll normally never saturate that.

ASP.NET high CPU load doesn't occur when running the service as a console once?

My environment: Windows Server 2008, IIE 7.0, ASP.NET
I developed a Silverlight client.
This client gets updates from the ASP.NET host through a WCF web service.
We get 100% CPU usage and connection drops when we have a very low number of users (~50).
The server should clearly be able to handle a lot more than that.
I ran some tests on our DEV server and indeed 100 requests / s maxes out the CPU.
What's odd is that even if the service is replaced by a dummy sending back hardcoded data the service still maxes out the CPU.
The thread count looked very low at about 20 so I thought there was some contention somewhere.
I changed all configuration options I could find to increase the worker threads (processModel, httpRuntime and the MaxRequestsPerCPU registry entry).
Nothing changed.
Then I stopped the IIS server and ran the web service as a console (removing all the ASP authentication references).
The service maxed out the CPU as well.
Then comes the magic part: I killed the console app and restarted IIS and now the service runs a 5-60% CPU with 100 requests / s and I can see 50+ worker threads.
I did the same thing on our preprod machine and had the same magic effect.
Rebooting the machines keeps the good behaviour.
So my question is: what happened to fix my IIS server? I really can't understand what fixed it.
Cheers.
Find out the root cause of the high CPU usage, and then you can find a fix,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919791

impact of disabling recycling of worker process in IIS application pool

I have a WCF service hosted in IIS which takes a long time (around 5 hours) to execute. the WCF service basically generates some reports using SSRS (SQL server reporting services) and saves them to a locaton on the server. this service was actually stopping after generating few reports, so I disabled the "recycling of worker process", "shut down worker processes after being idle" and "limit kernel request queue" in application pool and that fixed the issue and all the reports were generated regardless of the amount taken to generate them. but I am not sure if this is the right fix for this and I would like to know what is the impact of unchecking these settings in application pool for the WCF service in IIS? and is there any better way to get around this problem?
For any long running process it is much better to do it outside of IIS.
In this case I would have a regular windows service running that monitored a request queue. When a request comes in to generate a report, it would then spin off a thread to perform the generation.
The web service would be responsible for 3 things. First, adding an item to the queue to be handled. Second, checking status on the queue as to whether the report is ready. Third, sending the completed report back to the calling client.
This would allow the client to essentially do a fire and forget on the report request and call back later to check on it's status. Further it would mean that if IIS recycled for whatever reason you are still OK.
For bonus points I would add some error handling code that when the windows service restarted it could restart report jobs that were in the middle of execution. This would make it a bit more robust and allow you to reboot the server at any point.
I have disable also all the automatic shut down process from iis for my application with out any issue. I have monitor the memory limits and of course the program work smoothly with out any issues on memory.
I think that this automatic shut down triggers are designed mostly for process that keep too many web sites together and possible some of them have not good programming. But if you are the master of your iis, and you have check your program that have not memory issue, then is better to not shut it down, or at least control the shut down process with some way.
Ok is better to make long running process outside IIS, but is not so simple to develop it, not so simple to install it, not so simple to check it out.

WCF Performance Slow for the first call

I have a WCF service installed on IIS7. I noticed that the first call to my service is always very very slow. The subsequent calls are much faster & acceptable.
If there are no calls made to the service for some time, it again goes to sleep mode. After this the next call again takes a long long time.
Any remedies for this problem?
It is because of process management on IIS. When there are no calls for certain period of time IIS release the recourses and stops the process.
This is why you can notice that it is slow for first request and for requests after a long delay. Because while the first request or after long period of silence IIS loads everything from scratch. JIT complier runs and etc...
Also note :
When you are hosting WCF services on IIS, the WCF services enjoy all the features of ASP.NET applications. You have to be aware of these features because they can cause unexpected behavior in the services world. One of the major features is application recycling, including application domain recycling and process recycling. Through the IIS Management Console, you can configure different rules when you want the recycling to happen. You can set certain thresholds on memory, on time, and on the amount of processed requests. When IIS recycles a worker process, all the application domains within the worker process will be recycled as well
If you need automatic starting: The Windows Service Control Manager allows you to set the startup type to automatic, so that as soon as Windows starts, the service will be started, without an interactive logon on the machine. So you can use Windows service as a host.
More details you can check in Hosting and Consuming WCF Services.
There is another approach through which you can make it better. We have some kind of scehduled process which keeps hitting our server like every 5 mins with very light 'fetch' requests to keep all servers "hot" (by loading most of the required dlls etc) so that user experience is far better.
I agree it is not a fool proof way but still is something you can consider apart from increasing the recycling settings in IIS.

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