Azure Web App Restart Issue

Question

We have a few applications installed within a single "Web App" on Azure. We've configured each one as an Application (Configure>Virtual Applications and Directories and checkbox checked).

I've noticed that whenever we update a dll in one of the applications all of them get restarted. Any way to prevent this from happening other than creating a separate "Web App" for each application?

We need all of these apps to live under a single domain but remain independent.

I think it is because I have the main site under "/" and other applications nested in it. This was done to map the site to the root.

We have it defined this way: Site - "/" - mapped to site\wwwroot Application - /account mapped to site\account Pretty much the way it is set in this article. The physical folders are adjacent and the virtual folders are nested so one would expect that they would not affect each other.

Answer 1

We could not find a way to work around this issue. Eventually, we've resorted to azure slot swapping which provides zero downtime: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-staged-publishing/