My application is running in a shared hosting environment. I do have a dedicated App Pool for my app. I've been doing some testing with 1st visits and precompile performance and have been tracking when my application starts up and shuts down.
In my Global.asax I have some logging code in Application_Start and Application_End. I can see from my logs generally when the application is idle and shuts down, then someone visits and it starts back up.
But, I also see cases where a shutdown is logged and then followed by another shutdown about 13 minutes later; without a startup in the middle.
I also see instances where there are two Startups in a row. I'm guessing these might be a recycle, but why wouldn't there be a shutdown log entry?
What I'd really like to know if there is a better way to track when my application starts, when it shuts down and if it is shutdown due to an idle pool, or from a recycle. I don't have access to the Windows Event Log so I need to do this from my app if possible.
Application_Start and Application_End should only be called once per lifetime in your application, MSDN confirms this.
Without knowing your hosting environment it is possible that your web host is running your website over multiple worker pools or IIS instances. Your application pool could also be unexpectedly crashing due to other apps in the pool.
Without access to the Event Log or anything other than a basic web host control panel your best way of logging is what you're doing now, using Global.ASAX
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I have a ASP.NET 4.5 application that runs in an application pool with a particular domain user name and password. It's been working fine for months. A few days ago, there was an Active Directory issue whose details remain unknown to me, but my application users reported around the time of the issue that they were unable to use the application.
The AD issue was eventually "resolved," but the users still could not use the application - until I recycled the application pool.
Before the recycle, I was catching this first-chance exception:
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8007052E): The user name or password is incorrect.
at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)
After the recycle, I stopped seeing this exception.
The exception itself was being generated by a call to PrincipalContext.FindByIdentity that was failing until I recycled the app pool.
Why on Earth would an app pool recycle change the behavior of PrincipalContext if the app pool credentials didn't change?
App Pools using domain accounts work with the AD domain controllers to validate the domain user.
Since we don't know what happened in your Company with AD we can't definitively say why. We can only assume or conjecture that it appears to have caused this to go wrong.
Resetting the pool after AD was happy again reset this magic. Magic - as in I don't actually know under the hood mechanics but the app pool relies on AD to authenticate the domain user.
Your default app pool recycle time of 29 hours would have eventually fixed it as well. You just did this yourself.
Let's suppose I have an ASP.Net web application hosted by IIS. In addition to the functionality serving requests I added an action executed periodically on specified interval, e.g. every 30 minutes. This action is not related to external web requests, for example, its purpose is deleting useless log files.
The question is: if nobody comes to my web site for long period of time (day, week) will IIS still keep my application alive and the above action will be executed every 30 min. Or IIS will shut down/suspend activity of the application if there are no requests for long time?
Perhaps it is a lame question but I failed to find the definite answer.
IIS doesn't shut down, but IIS will recycle your app after a certain period of time of unuse.
So if your app is responsible for firing off the event, then no it won't run if your app is not running (recycled).
Either have a service hit your website once in awhile or setup a scheduled task on the server if you have access to the machine.
If you're on shared hosting you'll have to check their features to see if they have something like that.
Also, if you're just trying to delete log files or something trivial and not time sensitive (since you won't have logs unless someone is hitting your site), you could just perform your action in Application_Start. This even will fire whenever IIS restarts your application.
I have an application in classic asp running on IIS 7. The website uses global ASA (Application_OnStart and Session_OnEnd, the others are not being used)
The problem is this. When one user logs in/out, sometimes the entire site does some sort of IIS reset and all the visitors of that site will have their sessions all reset. If any visitor was logged, it kicks them out and they have to login again.
There is some sort of activity triggering this mass session reset, or better yet, IIS reset, because it only happens sometimes. I am not sure what could be causing it.. Any suggestions?
Use the "Recycling..." action on the relevant Application pool in IIS Manager to check the Recycling conditions.
Anything that causes recycling of the application pool will result in the loss of all current sessions. Use the same dialog to turn on logging of recycles (if not already on).
Use event log to track any recycles and their cause.
Internet Information Services (IIS) application pools can be periodically recycled to avoid unstable states that can lead to application crashes, hangs, or memory leaks. Please check this event id on technet. It explains a bit more.
If you disable recycle settings and your application is buggy then there is lots of chances of your website getting down. Recently I also increased the session timeout of my website but it was timing out 12:45 irrespective of ilde time out. Hence I shifted the recycle settings to 20:00 during non buiness hours. So that it can clear all the unwanted app pools.
I have a task that I want to be run 8am daily and am considering this solution: https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/easy-background-tasks-in-aspnet/
But I'm not understanding the mechanics of how it works.
Say user X visits the site on Friday at 4pm and then closes his browser and turns his computer off. Will the cache expiration still fire on Saturday at 8am? If no users visit the site, will my process still fire every day?
Basically, my question boils down to, is this method reliable? Or is it dependent on users visiting the site?
ASP.NET Application When hosted (started) on IIS fires few Events, of Which Application_Start is one of the foremost. Setting a Background task then keeps running untill the Application is stopped/unloaded from IIS, or IIS service itself is stopped. IIS is a host process for all ASP.NET Websites.
Since the Cache is maintained on the Web Server, it has nothing to do with the active user(s).
This is analogous to a console aplpication, where the first line of code is adding something to a cache with a timer. runs as long as your console application is up and running.
Hope this helps you!
The server side cache is different to the browser cache. Users closing their browsers won't effect Jeff's code at all. However, if your application pool shuts down (and it may if there aren't any users hitting the site) then your code won't run at all until someone browses to the site, the app pool spins up again, and then it's 8am the next day (assuming the app pool is still up).
Can I objectively determine if my production ASP.NET web application is resetting its application pool? It could be for whatever reason (for example, an error occurred or memory topped off). I don't have direct access to my production servers, so when I want something on the server, I have ask specifically for it like PerfMon counters to run. It is a running IIS 6.0.
I understand that I could use PerfMon to catch ASP.NET Application Restarts. If I was not monitoring that PerfMon, is there anything that can tell me the application restarted sometime in the past?
You'll need access to the Event Logs.
Depending on your IIS version you might have to enable the worker processing recycling events.
For IIS 6: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc756146(WS.10).aspx
For IIS 7: http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.applicationHost/applicationPools/add/recycling
For more info, ask again on serverfault.com
If all you really care about is if the application resets, you can just add some sort of Email alert, or logging, in the Application_Start of your global.asax.
This would tell you when, and how often, the application starts up, but wouldn't give you any details as to why it happened.
This would at least give you the information you needed to look at specific times for when your application is resetting.