In IIS (6.0 specifically), under the Home Directory tab, if I change the local path, will this cause either IIS to restart or the application pool to recycle?
Related, is there a reference that outlines which changes to the IIS metabase will trigger either a restart or app pool recycle? I haven't been able to find this yet.
Changing the path to a website in the Home Directory path won't cause the worker process to restart. It will however cause the Application Domain for the website to tear down and restart.
Worker process restarts can be caused by a number of events, most commonly:
If any of the conditions on the Recycling tab of an Application Pool's properties are met.
If CPU monitoring (in an application pool's properties Performance tab) is enabled and one of the monitoring thresholds is met, and, if the required action is set to Shutdown.
There is a catastrophic error such as an unchecked exception thrown by your code on a different thread than the current request thread.
IISRESET
You manually force a recycle or stop and start the application pool
It should also be noted that an application pool recycle is different from a restart. When an application pool recycles, IIS starts a new worker process. All new requests are sent to this new process. The existing worker process is kept running but will be torn down after all outstanding requests are completed or the shutdown time limit is reached.
Existing ASP.NET sessions are retained in the old worker process until they are abandoned. This ensures ASP.NET session state is not lost upon a recycle, i.e. if there are still ASP.NET sessions, the requests matching those sessions will be routed to the old worker process. Classic ASP sessions are unfortunately lost because ASP doesn't have this same capability.