IIS application pool failed to respond to ping

iiswindows-server-2003

I have been investigating a problem that occurred on a Windows 2003 server a few days ago. there are about 15 app pools, and within a few minutes, they all produced the error below in the system log:

A process serving application pool 'Pool 31x' failed to respond to a ping. The process id was '7144'.

The pools were then restarted automatically, but timed out during startup, leaving all sites down.

My question is: what would cause a "ping timeout" to all of the app pools around the same time, and then why would they start up too slowly?

The app in each pool is a WCMS which uses the .NET 1.1 framework. It connects to a remote DB but is otherwise independent of other machines.

Best Answer

"Ping" in IIS is nothing but a health check done by W3SVC to monitor the state of the worker process. When you see an event such as "A process serving application pool 'appPool' failed to respond to a ping." means the process is in dead state.

Rapid fail protection is the recycling option which takes care of such issue and recycles the appPool on it's own to such that it maintains good health of the worker process.

You will need to debug the process to get to the root of the issue.

Since you have .net application loaded in the workper process it's not a bad idea to check the Application Event log and see for any .net framework Warning or Error. You can attach Debug Diagnostics tool to the process and take a dump to check what is causing the issue. Follow the article How to use the Debug Diagnostics tool to troubleshoot a process that has stopped responding in IIS

Related Solutions

Iis – Server 2003 IIS Error

This problem might occur because ASP.NET limits the number of worker threads and completion port threads that a call can use to execute requests.

Typically, a call to a Web service uses one worker thread to execute the code that sends the request and one completion port thread to receive the callback from the Web service. However, if the request is redirected or requires authentication, the call may use as many as two worker and two completion port threads. Therefore, you can exhaust the managed ThreadPool when multiple Web service calls occur at the same time.

For example, suppose that the ThreadPool is limited to 10 worker threads, and all 10 worker threads are currently executing code that is waiting for a callback to execute. The callback can never execute because any work items that are queued to the ThreadPool are blocked until a thread becomes available.

Another potential source of contention is the maxconnection parameter that the System.Net namespace uses to limit the number of connections. Generally, this limit works as expected. However, if many applications try to make many requests to a single IP address at the same time, threads may have to wait for an available connection. To resolve these problems, you can tune the following parameters in your Machine.config file to best fit your situation:
* maxWorkerThreads
* minWorkerThreads
* maxIoThreads
* minFreeThreads
* minLocalRequestFreeThreads
* maxconnection
* executionTimeout
To successfully resolve these problems, do the following...

The quote's continued here... If that doesn't work, you can dig deeper with what's explained here.

Iis – .NET Framework 1.1 on IIS 7

Windows 2008 doesn't have .NET 1.1 installed. You can manually install .NET 1.1.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Iis – Server 2003 IIS Error

Iis – .NET Framework 1.1 on IIS 7

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