IIS Stops Responding

[disintegration]

Hi, I have a problem where my IIS stops responding about once every 3 or 4 weeks. None of the websites come up, Treos no longer get email, can't even access it on the machine using localhost. No funny business in the event logs... it just goes away. Restarting IIS does nothing. Rebooting the server is the only thing that resurrects it.

So, I guess I'm more curious to learn how people troubleshoot IIS in these situations. Obviously an answer would be helpful, but it'd be nice to "learn how to fish," as it were.

My problem is exactly like the pasted link below. But, upgrading to SP2 did not solve my problem.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/Web_Servers/IIS/Q_21579996.html

Any ideas?

Thank you,

Daniel.



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Space travel's in my blood.

 

[Skittle]

I could be wrong but I think you need to look at 'Application pools' within IIS.

You can create an application pool and assign web sites to it within IIS. You can specify against the application pool how regularly the worker processes are recycled to clear down your session cache. You can even specify times and days for it to do it so you could schedule it for 3am in the morning once a week.

There are various other options you can check for as well that are performance related against an Application Pool.
It's just another tree in IIS 6.0.


Dazed and confused

 

[disintegration]

Thank you for the response. I've given it a try... didn't see anywhere to specify a day to do it once a week, so I just set it for 3am everyday.

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Space travel's in my blood.

 

[Skittle]

Let us know how it goes.
I'd really like to know.

Dazed and confused

 

[Skittle]

I sat bolt upright in bed last night afer a disturbing nightmare about Raquel Welch and Darlecks and realised I think your problem may be something else.

I suggest you need to do a performance log on your server after you have rebooted it and compare it with a performance log when IIS is no longer working. That should reveal the problem. You could also set a few alerts on the server as well as write them to the application log.

The counters to watch/check/log are :-
Memory: Available Bytes
Memory: Pages/Second ( >20 is bad)
Page File Usage ( >70 = bad )
Memory: Pool NonPaged Bytes ( growing is bad )

Processor: % Processor Time ( >70% bad )
System rocessor Queue ( > 1 per processor bad )
Processor : %Time ( > 50% is bad )

PhysicalDisk : % Disk Time ( >50% is bad )

Network Interface : Current Bandwidth ( bits )
Network Interface : Bytes Total/sec ( >40% of current
Bandwith is bad )

These counters will lead you to identify if the problem is on your server rather than IIS.

Again let me know how it goes, I'm really interested.
I just happen to be learning about IIS and performance at the moment so your problem is right in the area I've got in my head at the moment.



Dazed and confused

 

[disintegration]

Well, right off, I've noticed that the server is regularly tripping the alert for Pages/Second with values of 25, 31, 51, and as high as 61. Additionally, the %Disk Time is being barely tripped occasionally... with a value of ~53.

Does this mean it's accessing the disk more often than it should? We don't have enough memory?

I should mention that we run Small Business Server 2003 and our IIS is basically only used to support ActiveSync for our mobile devices and our Outlook Web Access. So, it's our domain controller that runs Exchange and IIS for about 25 people. Our Exchange database is at about 17GB with only a couple users with mailboxes around 2-3GB.

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Space travel's in my blood.

 

[Skittle]

From what I've read, the %Disk Time is suspicious but not something to go overboard on. Some texts allow a much higher threshold up tob 80%.

It sounds like you need to increase the size of your virtual memory file and/or get some more memory.
I'd still wait until you see performance figures for server when IIS is not responding. That is the key to understanding whats going wrong.


Dazed and confused

 

[disintegration]

I suspect it should happen any day now if it's going to occur... it usually happens around the end of the month!

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Space travel's in my blood.

 

[disintegration]

I mean... around 30 days of uptime. Wow... yeah, Monday!

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Space travel's in my blood.