ASP Stopped working suddenly

Hi there,

I have recently started looking after a Windows server for a client. I have basic knowledge but Im used to running low-security local dev boxes..

Anyways I got a call from my client to say that his sites aren't working further investigation showed that it was only ASP driven sites that wern't working any written in PHP or HTML were still fine.

Jumped on MS Support and found an article that helped me troubleshoot the problem..

It told me to Change the Application Protection to Low and if the pages worked it was a problem with my IWAM acc and that I should add that to the Admin group and switch App Protection back to Medium or High did that and the sites worked..

Then I downloaded some monitoring tools on advise from the troubleshooter went to break the sites by removing the IWAM acc from the Admin group, so I could see what was happening and after I did that and guess what all the sites started working again.

So long story but the questions are will IIS just do this sometimes?

Why did adding the IWAM acc to Admin group then removing from Admin group fix the problem?

Properly configured and coded, IIS is extremely stable.

Sounds like you have some incorrect permission setting somewhere. The trick will be to find out the "somewhere" If you want help you'll need to post exact error messages, code, etc.

Thats Doug, I have found what I think is the problem. I think from all the symtoms Im experiencing there is a memory leak or Im hosting too many sites and the server doesn't have enough resources.. Im going to looking into Pooling but not sure where to start with that.

the server has only 512mb so Im looking to up that by a 1gig.. the cost of re-coding all the systems on the server would be huge. My client has spent in excess of $40k over the course of a couple of years not huge but for a small country town real estate agent that is pretty big. Plus the developer who wrote the stuff has retired.

The systems use a lot of Access Databases - does it sound right to you that maybe the DB's are getting to their limit or there is sloppy coding that is causing a memory leak. To me I think if the system was run out of MySQL or MS SQL it may be right..

Sounds like you have a good idea of the problem, and 512m for a server that has any traffic is pretty low. I have more ram in my workstation.

Review your code for orphaned objects, i.e., objects like recordsets that you might open but don't close in your code. There is an excellent article in the asp section of the msdn library called "25 tips for asp" or something like that.

And Access can be problematic, the drivers are not very robust. I'd definitely consider using ms sql server. Mysql is also good, but it's more difficult to implement with asp pages.

Oh, and modern IIS has connection pooling built in. The trick is to make sure you close database objects in your code as soon as you're done with them. IIS will automatically try to pool the open connection if it can.