IIS Application Pools and ColdFusion

We have recently migrated all of our applications to a new MS 2003 server.  Ever since the applications kept going down even though the server was still up and functioning normally.  Eventually we figured out that it was the application pool that went down.  We separated the applications out to another application pool and eventually identified one application as the source of the problem.  So now all other applications are up but this one application keeps going down.  But now what? we have no clues how to fix this.  It is an old fusebox 3 application and we are using wsconfig to connect between IIS and JRUN.  What kind of activities in the site that can possibly bring down the application pool? We have an upload feature, but I don't think it is used extensively.  Please help! Johnny

I don't know about MS 2003 too much, but in 2008 the app pools have two related "Rapid-fail protection" settings that we had to tweak: the "maximum failures" and "failure interval".  It appears that app pools can be set up to shut themselves down when IIS sees too many errors within a given amount of time.  The defaults are 5 errors in 5 minutes, which is not very forgiving. (We were generating http error responses on purpose and this triggered a shutdown until we figured out what was going on.) We have recently migrated all of our applications to a new MS 2003 server.  Ever since the applications kept going down even though the server was still up and functioning normally.  Eventually we figured out that it was the application pool that went down.  We separated the applications out to another application pool and eventually identified one application as the source of the problem.  So now all other applications are up but this one application keeps going down.  But now what? we have no clues how to fix this.  It is an old fusebox 3 application and we are using wsconfig to connect between IIS and JRUN. What kind of activities in the site that can possibly bring down the application pool? We have an upload feature, but I don't think it is used extensively.  Please help! Johnny

Any shutdown in an IIS application pool is a process crash and needs to be debugged with a post-mortem userdump.  My recommendation is that you open a support ticket with Microsoft to identify the root cause.  Be aware, however, that in 90% of the cases we see, the cause is in a 3rd party component (meaning the JRUN ISAPI dll or something else, not an IIS problem in itself) acting up and we will only be able to go so far with the root cause analysis.  However, when we identify the issue, we ought to be able to more properly direct you to the right place to get the next level of support. Regards, Matt Small ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

Another easy thing to try: Drop and recreate your app pool. It sounds stupid but we had one server where one app pool wasn't stable but all of the other servers we had (running the same app) were fine.  Recreating the app pool resolved the issue. BTW, you should be seeing failures in your Event Viewer. Check them out... You might find something useful in there... Even just knowing when (exactly) the failures are happening can be useful. Thanks   Mark ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

Also give recreate wsconfig another try. Remove the cf instance from IIS and add the connection again... This helped me in the past with these weird IIS crashes. Michael 2008/12/2 Gaulin, Mark <mgaulin@globalspec.com> ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----