How to diagnose IIS fatal communication error problem

Question

I've a a customer using IIS and an application, developed by us, in Asp.NET 1.1. Monday, for 4 times in a row the error “A process serving application pool 'xxxx' suffered a fatal communication error with the World Wide Web Publishing Service. The process id was 'yyyy'. The data field contains the error number.” appeared.

Any idea about how to diagnose this? The only link I've found talks about installing low level debug tools but before proceeding in this kind of low level analysis I would know if someone has a better idea or a suitable alternative.

The problem (from what I can see) is something in the customer environment, because the same application it's installed at other customer sites on at least 20 or 30 different servers and the problem do not happen.

Regards

Massimo

Answer 1

I'm sure you already know this, but the App Pool contains 1.1 applications only right? I don't remember the error you get when the pool dies by trying to mix frameworks (something like Server Unavailable), but it's more common then I thought in the wild so I would double check.

While not likely the case, it's somewhere to start.

Edit: This KB article also had the error message you described relating to registry permissions, what version of IIS is the client running?

Answer 2

Try the IIS Debug Diagnostics Tool as a start.

Answer 3

I had this same problem when a website was deployed to a client's web server. This Microsoft support article says:

"This issue may occur if the NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE account does not have the permissions to the required registry keys."

And the resolution is: "set the permissions to the required registry keys, and then restart IIS 6.0."

The linked article has the steps for doing this.

Answer 4

are you using iis 6 or 7? something else i forgot to ask is this a medium thrust app or what?

Answer 5

One more popular reason (as in my case) - one of windows logs is full.