App Pool does not start after recycle until site access

Question

I am having an issue with a site we host, it is on windows server 2012 R2 with IIS 7. There are more than 8 sites on this server (all Identical in software).

We are having an issue with one site, that when the application pool recycles it will not come back online until someone trys to go to the website (www.something.com) once that happens you see the site app pool come online in the task manager and logging starts happening in the site.

Steps taken:

1. recreated the website in IIS
2. Recreated the files inside the root from a known working site
3. Recreated the application pool with settings to mirror another known site (remember they are all identical)

Each site has its own root file structure and application pool

Event Viewer does not allude to any issues.

Site logs just show where it stopped and started again. No Errors

All Sites are .net 2.0 32bit

---

From what I can tell, it appears that the app pool is waiting on a request from a user accessing the domain to start, but can not pin point what the problem is.

Answer 1

That is standard behaviour of IIS, not an error or issue. The site only comes into memory on first access and that usually takes longer than subsequent access. The only way I know of to have the site always load is to setup some kind of cron job to poll the site every so often. There are web site monitoring tools which can be used as well which do this and more, also reporting if the site is unreachable.