OWA and IIS Application Pools – recommended Recycling policy

application-poolsexchange-2003iis-6outlook-web-app

My sys-admin colleagues have an Exchange 2003 R2 SP2 server running Outlook Web Access (OWA) through an IIS 6 server (naturally).

OWA seems to crash every couple of weeks. Looking at the Application Pool recycling in IIS, I notice that all of the Recycling options (by time, by number of requests, fixed time etc) are switched off.

Would it be a good idea to switch on Application Pool Recycling (e.g. at 3am every day or something like that) or is recycling the Application Pool not recommended for OWA?

edit: Inconclusive answers so far … Has anyone else tried this?

Best Answer

ExchangeApplicationPool shouldn't be recycled, if it is configured to then OWA can become unreliable.

In a default install of Exchange 2003 on Windows 2003 it looks like this:

Recycling Tab

  • Everything Unchecked

Performance Tab

  • Shutdown worker processes after being idele for (unchecked)
  • Limit the kernel request queue (checked - 1000 Requests)
  • Enable CPU Monitoring (unchecked)
  • Maximum number of worked processes (1)

Health Tab

  • Enable pinging (Checked 30 seconds)
  • Enable rapid-fail protection (Checked)
    • Failures (5)
    • Time Period (5)
  • Startup time limit (90)
  • Shutdown time limit (90)

Identity Tab

  • Varies depending on options

KB906907 : Instructions on re-creating the ExchangeApplicationPool

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