IIS7 – How to Get IIS7 to Release a Locked File

filesiisiis-7

During our production builds, a very large (10 megabyte) static content file in the root directory will sometimes be locked by IIS and cannot be deleted by the clean task. This is presumably because it is being actively served to one or more clients at the time.

The build process stops the website before cleaning via

c:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe stop site http://oursite.com

However, this does not release the file – we have to restart IIS to get the process to relinquish its lock.

appcmd.exe allows you to take IIS down completely; we do not want to do this!

Are there any other ways to get IIS to let go of a locked file, without restarting IIS? Simply stopping and starting the individual website is definitely not working to release the file lock.

Best Answer

There are tools, such as Sysinternal's Process Explorer, that can find and forcibly close file handles, however the state and behaviour of the application (both yours and, in this case, IIS) after doing this is undefined. Some won't care, some will error and others will crash hard.

The correct solution is to take the outage and allow IIS to cleanly release locks and clean up after itself to preserve server stability. If this is not possible, you can either create another site on the same box, or set up a new box with the new content, and move the domain name/IP across to "promote" the new content to production.

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It would look something like this:

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