Question : IIS Page Load Delay

I have an asp.net website hosted on an win2k3 IIS 6.0 server.  The site only gets a few hits per day, but these hits are very important b/c of the products we are selling.  The site normally loads extremely fast.  But, when the site has not been hit for a while, say 30 minutes, I get a long initial delay of around 10 seconds before the page starts loading.  It seems like IIS goes to sleep after a certain period of inactivity, or that something is being re-cached server side after a certain timeout.

I'm wondering if there is some 'keep alive' setting or something of that nature to combat my 'inital hit delay' problem.  If I can't solve the problem, my workaround is to create a windows application that's only function is to periodically load my website.  Wouldn't that be a hoot!

Also, I'm testing this on a LAN to rule out any internet influence.

Thanks in advance!

Answer : IIS Page Load Delay

Initial page load for an ASP.Net page takes some time to compile the page, load assemblies, etc.

The fact that this happens after about 30 minutes is what really makes the difference though.....

In IIS 6.0 Application Pools are set by default to shut down if idle for more than 20 minutes.

Bring up the properties on the Application Pool for your site, look for the 'Shutdown when Idle' setting (second tab if I remember right) and deselect it.

You will still see some slowness for the initial page load but now the worker process won't shut down causing the need to reload the page when the worker process restarts.

Dave Dietz