We have an application pool dedicated to a WCF service that is called infrequently (maybe 15-20 times per day). The calls can take several minutes, however, and the other day we got burned when IIS recycled the app pool while the call was still processing because the shutdown timeout ran out.
We're considering using request limit recycling, instead, but my question is this: When the application pool recycles "after x requests", is that after the xth request completes? Or does it kick off the request, start the overlapped process to handle new requests, then subject the xth request to the same shutdown timeout that currently burns us?
Question in a similar vein:
How to detect if the current application pool is winding up in IIS7.5 and Asp.Net 3.5+
Check your Shutdown Time Limit setting on the app pool.
Regardless of how you do the recycling, this setting is checked to determine how long a request is allowed to carry on for before being forcibly shut down.
When an app pool is recycled, IIS attempts to drain the running requests from the app pool first, and then a in the meantime a new app pool is already started which accepts new requests. By making the setting high enough to accommodate your long running requests, you will allow IIS to safely drain the old app pool.