I'm currently fighting an issue with ASP.Net taking minutes to load a page for the first time. Through playing with settings I've found that disabling "Shutdown worker processes after being idle for (time in minutes)" stops the issue from occurring… I assume the reason it stops my issue from occurring is due to the fact the worker process does not end and therefor the app pool never needs to recreate itself.
Is there any harm in disabling this option? What ramifications could it have?
Best Answer
I highly recommend turning off the idle timeout in most situations. It's the default but it's meant more for bulk hosters that want unused worker processes to be ended so that they can always assume that they won't have all of them running at the same time.
However, if you have just a few production app pools on a server but occasionally don't have a visitor in a 20 minute space (i.e. overnight), you don't want your app pool to stop. You likely have enough resources to have all of your app pools running at once.
Additionally the default settings of recycling the app pool at 1740 minutes should also be changed. I recommend scheduling it for an off-peak time like 4:00am daily rather than having it at different times each day. More on that here on my website.