Worker process reached its allowed processing time

Question

We are experiencing this issue approximately once a month. It is very hard to pinpoint the cause so any help would be appreciated. This causes the App pool to stop and brings the site down. We have gone through all log files and have concluded nothing. We are using the 2.0.3 version on IIS 6.

Answer 1

This likely indicates an infinite loop in your application code.

Basically, every time a request comes into the web server, IIS hands the request off to a worker process. You can configure in IIS how many of those workers there are, and what the timeout value is. The timeout is to keep things moving in case the application code hangs -- it gets killed so the thread can go back in the pool to keep servicing new requests.

So look through your code for likely infinite loops. Or alternatively, it could be an extremely long-running database query that could have eventually finished but exceeded the timeout value. Perhaps your web application offers the end user an opportunity to make too broad of a query that returns too much data or requires too much DB processing time.

It's hard to give a specific cause for you, of course, but try to think along these lines.

Answer 2

If you're experiencing a crash as a result (sounds like you are) then you might want to grab a copy of Debugging Tools for Windows and spend some time reading Tess Ferrandez' blog--she offers great advice on performing post mortem crash analysis and makes WinDbg a whole lot more approachable.