IIS 7.5 Application Warm-up

Here is a great new feature for iis 7.5. A new Module called Application Warm-up. It allows you to specify a url to be launched after an iis-refresh or the application pool recycles. It basically launches the site prior to the first request hitting the server. This is great for a number of reasons. If you have an application that is not used that frequently and has to load when people visit it, this would basically do that process when the app-pool recycles. It is also great for longer compile / warm-up sites like sharepoint.

http://www.iis.net/download/applicationwarmup

Auto-Start Web Applications

Some Web applications need to load large amounts of data or perform expensive initialization processing before serving the first request. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, for these situations you had to devise custom approaches to “wake up” an ASP.NET application and then run initialization code during the Application_Load method in the Global.asax file.

A new scalability feature named auto-start that directly addresses this scenario is available when ASP.NET 4 runs on IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2. The auto-start feature provides a controlled approach for starting up an application pool, initializing an ASP.NET application, and then accepting HTTP requests.

IIS Application Warm-Up Module for IIS 7.5

The IIS team has released the first beta test version of the Application Warm-Up Module for IIS 7.5. This makes warming up your applications even easier than previously described. Instead of writing custom code, you specify the URLs of resources to execute before the Web application accepts requests from the network. This warm-up occurs during startup of the IIS service (if you configured the IIS application pool as AlwaysRunning) and when an IIS worker process recycles. During recycle, the old IIS worker process continues to execute requests until the newly spawned worker process is fully warmed up, so that applications experience no interruptions or other issues due to unprimed caches. Note that this module works with any version of ASP.NET, starting with version 2.0.

For more information, see Application Warm-Up on the IIS.net Web site. For a walkthrough that illustrates how to use the warm-up feature, see Getting Started with the IIS 7.5 Application Warm-Up Module on the IIS.net Web site.

To use the auto-start feature, an IIS administrator sets an application pool in IIS 7.5 to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file:

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