IIS Recycling too often

Question

We run a .NET 1.1 application on W2k3 server. The app pool is configured to recycle at 512MB. However, a week ago it started to recycle every 2 minutes. Since we run a web farm, the anonymous user we run IIS with is a domain account. About a week ago, that user account expired, and we have to re-enable it. Could that have caused any problems? Maybe that user lost some permissions, or was left out of the IIS_WPG group. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Look in the server's Event Log. That may hold the answer.

Answer 2

Try finding out more info by Logging ASP.NET Application Shutdown Events

Answer 3

If after checking the logs and all the standard "App Pool Health" settings (the obvious), I would look for other processes that might be mucking around with your web.config file (check the timestamp on it), which of course causes the app to restart.

I was once at a customer site and we couldn't figure out why our app kept restarting (and dropping all session state, etc...) Turned out it was a broken "Auto-Encrypt All Web.Config Files" little script that they had scheduled to run every 5 minutes. Problem was it never properly detected that it successfully had encrypted the file, so it just kept rewriting every 5 minutes... sigh..