What's the difference between recycling an app pool manually vs automatically?

Question

I've noticed that you can manually recycle an application pool via IIS and that doing so seems to slow down my web app significantly less than making changes to files in App_Code or the web.config file. Is this because recycling the application pool via IIS doesn't force a recompilation of the temporary internet files, but changing App_Code or web.config does?

Answer 1

Yes... :)

Recycling just restarts the worker process to get rid of any memory leaks, etc. Changing anything will force a recompile.