I've got this problem.
I launched an ASP.NET website with the Umbraco CMS on an ISP.
(Its just a very basic informative site. nothing special.)
When I go want to visit the website however, the first pageload takes a lot of time, sometimes even up to 20 seconds. Of course this is ridiculous.
Afterwards, I am able to navigate the site relatively quick..
So every first pageload is slow, then everything is OK, more or less.
Does anybody have any idea what the problem could be? Would it be IIS? ASP.NET?
IIS is probably configured to shutdown the application pool after N minutes of inactivity.
AFAIK, this is the default behaviour on IIS.
If it is the first request to be served, IIS at least starts the APP Pool. This might take a bit of a time. Maybe Umbraco loads initially some data, but I did not have any experience with Umbraco, so that's beyond my knowledge.
-sa
What do you meen by first page load?
Have you just done a build? If this is a website then .Net will compile and load the dll. Then IIS will cache page outputs.
Do you have any large images on the page?
Essentially there are an infinate number of reasons. Have you used firebug? Determine where the loadtime is?
Do you have a link?
You may want to look into a keep alive service. There are many available that regularly poll you site to keep the application pool running and prevent the startup delay you are seeing. More information here and here.
Related
I have a pure html website, there is nothing to render.
On first run it takes about 10 seconds to load.
In the second time and above in a scope of 10-15 minutes it takes less then a second to load, Even if I open another browser.
I can see that a browser waiting for a response from the server, the server is IIS7 in integrated pipiline mode, if I set it to classic mode the issue is disappeared even if I will access again the website after 10 hours.
I'm pretty sure it's not about the application idle timeout because in integrated pipiline it's set to 1 hour.
Please advice.
Thanks
Easiest solution would probably be to add the Application Initialization plugin to your site. This blogpost should be of help. Basically it just pings your website occasionally so it gets the long load time, rather than a user.
Normally, I use App_Offline.htm for taking the site offline. But occasionally, when I do that, the site just hangs (like in: browsers wait forever, server gives no response at all). This seems to happen on an updateable site when I change something, like a control and afterward, when it doesn't go quick enough (site hangs), I place App_Offline.htm in the root of the website.
In most cases, this immediately takes down my site. But occasionally it doesn't. In those cases, I cannot just stop the website (when I restart, the behavior continues). Stopping the application pool doesn't let me restart the same app pool. The only two solution so far is restarting the whole IIS web service.
I'd like to prevent this from happening. Is this a bug in IIS not "breaking all actions" when App_Offline.htm is found? I use IIS 7 with Windows 2008 SP2 64 bit.
What I found was that my web.config file either had an error in it or was missing. When this is the case, app_offline.htm does not get processed.
IIS should not stop existing actions, only prevent new requests from going through: Will app_offline.htm stop current requests or just new requests?
It sounds like you are describing a scenario where you update a control, try to load a page, and IE is stuck loading. At this point you drop the app_offline.htm and expect to see that page immediately.
If you are making a completely separate/new request after putting app_offline.htm in place then you should see the page come up. However the existing request will not be affected as linked above.
If possible try deploying the app_offline.htm file prior to making the control change.
I am not sure what you mean by "Stopping the application pool doesn't let me restart the same app pool"...if you meant that you can't restart the pool immediately after stopping it, thats because it isn't stopped yet. Depending on the number of Worker Processes in that pool it may take a min for it to completely spin down so it can accept the start command.
Also, I would think you would have to restart the pool in order for the app_offline.htm to work effectively anyway.
Here's the thing.
Everytime when you open the .sln at the server, or updating the code, it will create the app_offline ticket in the root.
This is the feature from asp.net itself to prevent any access to disturb your development.
Delete the app_offline manually everytime after you open the .sln.
hope this help.
thanks.
Another possibility is a missing handler. The following handler is required:
ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0
To fix the issue you need to at a minimum:
Wait the length of your website timeout to ensure all requests have finished.
Background processes kicked off from a web request will mean further extending the length of time you wait beyond the website timeout
Unload any unmanaged code by hooking into the DomainUnload or Application_End events
I'm waiting 3 minutes for App_Offline.htm to take affect and this seems has allowed App_Offline.htm to work as expected.
One of my site is on a shared hosting and every few days the site will stop working.
The pages will simply stop loading.
After contacting my host they suggested that I disable/re-enable from their hosting
management tool the windows services for my site every time this happens.
In the list on their website I have: ASP, ASP.net and 2 other that I don't need.
When I disable and than immediately re-enable the 2 asp services the site does start
working again right away.
I'm under the impression that this is a probably due to a wrong configuration of the
application pool my domain is using but they're refusing to give details. No
automatic recycle maybe?
Beside changing host, do you have any suggestion about this problem?
Do you believe it's an app pool setup issue like I do or do you have any other
idea on what else could be causing this issue and/or ideas for a permanent solution?
Thanks.
I think there is something wrong with your code. I once ran into a similar issue with my web host and found out later that the app was leaking memory due to some resources that were opened and never closed. I suggest you inspect the code a bit more.
I've developed my first web application which, surprisingly, is getting very popular.
Because the website is now live, I have a hard time doing some changes, in fear some people are still logged in and are using the application.
I wish to avoid having a duplicated instance of the web application for testing.
Is there any way to put the website in 'maintenance mode' with only me having access to it? Like redirecting to a page with some info, telling its in maintenance mode.
I wish to avoid having a duplicated
instance of the web application for
testing.
That's your problem right there. For anything but the most trivial sites, you should have a staging or development instance. You should be using source control and have a script to update the main instance.
You can simply drop a file called app_offline.htm in the root of your website and ASP.NET will automatically route all traffic to this page. This file can contain any HTML you wish indicating that your site is down for a short period due to maintenance.
For more information please read App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature:
The way app_offline.htm works is that
you place this file in the root of the
application. When ASP.NET sees it, it
will shut-down the app-domain for the
application (and not restart it for
requests) and instead send back the
contents of the app_offline.htm file
in response to all new dynamic
requests for the application. When
you are done updating the site, just
delete the file and it will come back
online.
This is the answer to your question:
http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/219637/Put-the-website-in-Maintanance-Mode-Under-Construc
There's no such built-in functionality in ASP.NET except app_offline.htm which doesn't quite fit your needs because even you will be denied access to the site. You have to build it on your own but this is best done on the routers and load balancers level than at the application level. Of course this will depend on your network architecture.
Besides building a dev replica of your website to build patches and fixes on, couldn't you just announce a site closing for maintenance several days in advance? I'm not a web programmer, but you might want look into what Hattrick, a popular online soccer management, does for maintaining their site. They use a notification system on the homepage, after users sign-in, that announces when maintenance will be taking place (usually late at night in Europe where a large portion of the players and all the devs are located) and they close down the website for a couple of hours. When they take the site down they post a page, using the same style as the rest of the site, and provide an estimate of when it will be up and running again. Simple, elegant, and when coupled with the long forewarning it seems to do a good job placating the user base.
Give users a long heads up that planned maintenance is scheduled to take place and give them some idea what it is for and most people will be able to accommodate the down time. Nothing is more frustrating than purposefully going to a web app that was up and running 10-20 minutes ago to find it suddenly unavailable and down for maintenance.
Try app_offline.htm ??
What version of ASP.NET? I'm sure there are a million more elegant ways of doing this, but you can change the Default Document in IIS to redirect to Maint.html (or similar).
I am trying to get a grasp on how to handle updates to a live, functioning ASP.NET (2.0 or greater) Application while there are users on the site.
For example, suppose SO is an ASP.NET Web Application project. The project code compiles down to the single .DLL in the BIN folder. Now, there are constantly users on SO, so what would happen to users' actions/sessions if you would use the Visual Studio .NET "Publish" feature (or just FTP everything again manually) while they are using the site?
Would creating an ASP.NET Web Site, instead, alleviate any problems that may or may not exist with the scenario above? I am beginning to develop a web site as a user-driven Web Application, and I want to make sure that my inexperience with this would not potentially annoy the [potentially] many users that I [want to] have 24/7.
EDIT: Sorry, I should have put this in a more exact context. Assume that this site is being hosted by a web hosting service with monthly fees. I won't be managing the server itself, just what the web host allows as a user of their services.
I create two Web sites in IIS. One is the production Web site, and the other is a static Web site with an HttpHandler that sends all requests to a single static "We're updating" HTML page served with an HTTP 503 Service Unavailable. Typically the update Web site is turned off. When it's time to update, we stop the production Web site, start the update Web site, and now we can fiddle with the production Web site all we want without worrying about DLLs being locked or worker processes needing to be spun down.
I started doing this because
App_Offline.htm really does not work well in Web Gardens, which we use.
App_Offline.htm serves its page as 404, which is bad if you're down for a meaningful period of time.
We can start the upgraded production Web site with modified settings (only listening on localhost), where we can do a last-minute acceptance/verification that everything is working before we flip the switch, turning off the update Web site and re-enabling the production Web site.
Things this does not solve include
Any maintenance that requires a restart of the server--you still have downtime where no page is served.
Any maintenance that diddles with the .NET runtime, like upgrading to the latest service pack.
Other approaches I've seen include
Having two servers. Send all load balancing requests to one server, upgrade the other one; then rinse and repeat. Most of us don't have this luxury.
Creating multiple bin directories, like bin-1.0.0.0 and bin-1.1.0.0 and telling ASP.NET which bin directory to use in the web.config file. (One advantage of this is that reverting to a previous binary is just editing a config file. A disadvantage is that it's harder to revert resources that don't end up in your binaries, like templates and images and such.) I don't remember how this actually worked--I think the application did some late assembly loading in its Global.asax based on its own web.config section (since you touched the web.config, the app had restarted, so it was okay).
If you find a better way, let me know!
Changing to the asp.net web site model won't have any effect, as the recycle will also happen, some of changes that trigger it for sure: web.config, global.asax, app_code.
After the recycle, user will still be logged in because asp.net will just validate the syntax. That is given you use a fixed machine key, otherwise it will change on each recycle. This is something you want to do anyway as other stuff can break if the key change across requests i.e. viewstate validation, embedded resources (decryption of the url fails).
If you can put the session out of process, like in sql server, you will avoid loosing the session. If you can't, your code will have to consider that. There are plenty of scenarios where you can avoid using session, and others were you can wrap it and re-retrieve the info if the session was cleaned. This should leave you with a handful specific cases that you know can give trouble to the users, so for those you do some of the suggestions others have already made.
One solution could be to deploy your application into a load balanced environment (web farm).
When deploying a new version you would use the load balancer to redirect requests to the server you are not deploying to.
App_offline.htm is great solution for this I think.
in SO we see application currently unavailable page when a deployment begins.
I am not sure how SO handles it.. But we usually put a holding page. So what ever the user has done (adding question or answering questions) does not get updated. As soon as he updates something he will see a holding page asking him to try after sometime.
And if I am the user I usually press the back button to make sure what I entered is saved in the browser history so that I can post later.
Some site use use are in clustered environment so I take one server offline and inform the load balancer that she will not be available and once I make sure that the new version is working fine I make it live.. I do the same thing for the next server.
Do we have any other option?
It is not a technical solution, but set up a scheduled maintenance window. You can annoucement in advance giving your user base fair warning that there is a possiblity that the application will not be available during that time frame.