I think my Webapplication gets shut down after a while.
It returns a new session if I haven't used the application in maybe 5 minutes. The session timeout is set to 720 minutes so that can't be the issue.
Is it maybe a setting in the Application Pool or something like that? I figure it is some sort of resource management. I use IIS 7.0
I am a dork with servers so please bear with me if I am missing the obvious here.
The simplest way is to use a script to open a connection to the website and request your page. See Joel Oleson's Blog for more information.
You can use windows scheduler to run every x minutes.
This maybe Sharepoint specific but you can adapt to your requirements.
Update: Try this version: WarmUpServer.zip
Application pools do recycle, and they do restart after achieving some limits in terms of execution time or number of requests etc, that can be set on IIS.
IIS 7 actually runs in pipeline mode so its something new which we dont know yet for sure, but all you can do to make your app alive is to set a trigger from some other machine which will connect your server in every 5 or 10 or 60 minutes and try to fetch one html page.
There can be various server monitors for http as well.
We had the same issue with a web service that had to stay online in such a way that we couldn't afford the latency involved in starting it up if it went stale.
We wrote a very simple Windows Service that woke up every 3 minutes and requested a page as @Wayne suggested. Worked like a charm.