IIS 6.0 hangs when serving a web-service

Question

Hi guys I am having issues with one of our web-services. It works fine on my development machine (win XP) whether I host it as a separate application or using cassini from Visual studio.

Once I deploy on the web-server (win 2003 server)it throws some generic error and crashes the IIS worker process(W3wp).

If I try to attach visual studio and debug the issue its throwing error at the very initial level even before displaying the default asmx page details. The error that is being caught is a stack-overflow exception.

Answer 1

It's hard to give a good answer without more details, so this is a bit of a stab in the dark...

The two most common issues I run into when deploying to the server are security (the site/service doesn't have the same permissions on the server as it does on your dev machine) and not having the same version, SP, etc of .net on the server as on the dev machine.

As for the stackoverflow only occuring on the server (complete guess here), have a look at your error handling. Is there any chance that you are getting an infinite loop of catch/throw type stuff?

You really need to point VS at your server and remote debug the issue to track it down properly.

Edit: Ok, if I'd read the question properly I would have seen that you are remote debuging.. Definitely dig into the logs to see exactly the point at which the error originates.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Without more information it's kind of hard to speculate as to what is wrong. However Tess Ferrandez's blog is a great resource for debugging this kind of problem. She has a set of debugging labs to help get you started on the road to being able to diagnose your problems:

.NET Debugging Demos - Information and setup instructions

These two labs might be worth looking at first:

.NET Debugging Demos Lab 2: Crash
.NET Debugging Demos Lab 5: Crash