Service Unavaiable - ApplicationPool won't start

Question

I have a WCF Web Service which is kept under an Application Pool on IIS.

Lately I've been getting "Service Unavaiable" when I'm trying to make calls to this Web Service. The first thing I tried to do was restarting the Application Pool. I did it and after a couple of seconds, it crashed and stopped.

Looking at the Event Viewer, I found these messages, which by the moment couldn't help me to find where the problem is.

A process serving application pool 'X' reported a failure. The process id was '11616'. The data field contains the error number.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

After getting a couple of these, I got this one:

Application pool 'X' is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I've already checked permissions and Application Pool configurations but everything seems to be OK.

Have anyone been through this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are couple of things you can try..

1. Try to create a separate App-pool in IIS and use that app-pool in the WCF service. This way, the app-pool is entirely dedicated for the WCF and would not throw any errors.

2. Are you using one of the built-in "Network service" or "Local Service" or "Local System" for the app-pool identity? If yes, try to setup a service account and use that in the app-pool identity.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Take a look at the identity that the Application Pool is running under. If you have it configured to run under a domain account, (and this is on an IIS 6.0 server) be sure that the domain account is a member of the local security group "IIS_WPG", for membership in the IIS_WPG group is needed to run the w3wp.exe worker process.