Iis – Speed up asp.net Development server

There are various things to check when asp.net starts acting all funky. Checking to make sure the extensions are allowed is one, though you usually end up getting 404 not found errors rather than other sorts of failures (this is an intentionally bogus error designed to avoid leaking information to potential hackers).

However, most sorts of troubleshooting eventualy come down to reinstalling the .NET Framework and then running aspnet_regiis.exe to reset everything. There shouldn't be any differences between IIS on 2k3EE vs 2k3SE.

Also, remember that IIS isn't PAE-aware so even if you do have tons of RAM on your box, you might still have problems taking advantage of it in any given app pool.

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.