I have a server running windows server 2008 R2, recently my websites have becoming unresponsive at least once a day, seemingly at random intervals.
I have installed some monitoring software and noticed that the anonymous user count spikes when this happens, it normally averages around 100-200 users, but the spikes are jumping to around 400-700 users.
This has only recently started to happen in the last few weeks, a restart of my IIS Server fixes almost immediately.
What should i be doing to investigate this further, what could be causing these spikes?
My initial thought was it being a spider crawling my site at a ridiculous rate, but i'm not sure how to determine if this is true or not.
Any advice is appreciated.
Best Answer
Does your monitoring software not show you what pages are being hit? That might help show you if it's a spider.
At any rate, it's either of :
Too much load for the plain ol' web server (IIS) and OS to handle, in which case you need to rate-limit your visitors (probably at your internet connection), or scale up to more servers, or scale out with a bigger server.
The visitors are hitting a dynamically-generated page that isn't dealing with the load well - in which case, you could either do one of the above solutions, or fix the code so it deals with more load better.
You have some mis-configuration in the OS. Have you confirmed that it's a web-server-related process that's driving the load high? Are you running SQL on the same machine, perhaps?
With the minimal amount of information given, that's about the most that I can say.