Dear all,

I've recently moved a client to our new Windows 2003 box, which currently runs a number of ASP.NET websites (all of these use the Default Application Pool).

The site I moved was a classic ASP website. I created a new website, set up the host headers and it was working perfectly (with some minor tweaks - enabling parent paths, etc.).

The problem I am having is that at least once per day the website drops. By dropping I means that I refresh my browser and it says "Website found, waiting for reply...", but there never is any reply. I know this isn't an internet connection issue as I'm remoted into the box using Terminal Services, and in addition my DNS is tested and working correctly.

I thought about the problem and guesses that the application was leaking and causing some fairly savage failures, so I created a new application pool for "ClassicASPSites" to take the problem away from the ASP.NET websites. I watched in task manager as a new "w3wp.exe" was spawned and slowly filled up with memory to about 70 megs. I thought this was a little much for one website, so went through every line of code on the Classic ASP site to make sure it wasn't leaking memory. There were a few areas it was leaking so plugged these, resulting in the size in memory dropping.

The site is still dropping daily and I've tried pretty much every configuration combination I can against the Application Pool I created. I've also attempted to allow two worker threads running side by side, and although this resulted in 100% uptime, it also made the site behave very strangely indeed: after logging into the site (using session state to maintain identity of the users), the site would be presented as a logged on user on one request then a guest on another (I guessed it was using different processes for different requests and therefore not sharing session state between the two ??). This behaviour made the site unusable so I had to revert to a single "w3wp.exe" instance.

My question is: Why does my server work for a day, then stop responding to all requests for the Classic ASP website pages? If they are crashing, how come the worker threads don't know to restart?

Any ideas would be graciously received.

Many thanks,
Jonny Tooze, MCP