I have a classic ASP application that has been stable for years and now we're having all kinds of problems with it. After moving the app between machines and wiping the original so we could have a fresh install of windows, we've come to the following "symptom". The app pools do not appear to allow for multiple simultaneous requests. Here's what we are seeing: The app runs normally for most people, but when someone within one of the app pools accesses a long-running script (usually one with lots of DB access) all of the other users in the pool must wait for that script to complete. Once the script completes, everyone else's requests run. This initially made us suspect the DB connection string or something. UNTIL... we noticed also that large file uploads into our system also cause the app pool to stop responding. What's interesting about this is that we're using the SAFileup COM+ object to do our uploads, which has a progress display in a pop-up window. When you go to upload the file, the progress display comes up, but then never refreshes to show upload progress. If you wait it out, however, the file will eventually upload and the other pending requests will process as normal. Our app pools are in the default configuration, using the IWAM account to launch. I checked to ensure that the IWAM account has all the appropriate permissions. It does. We've tried a variety of DB connection strings, none solved the problem (though I'm thinking it's not the DB connection string). Just in case someone thinks it is, here's our connection string: "Provider=SQLNCLI;Trusted_Connection=yes;Server=(local);Database=demo;". It couldn't be simpler. This string was previously not a problem. I fussed with the web gardens thing and it does, indeed, make the system respond to multiple requests, but each worker thread in the garden has its own session state which causes our users to get booted when their request gets randomly assigned to a new worker thread. Only having a single worker process in the garden was never an issue before anyway. I've used SQL Profiler and sp_who2 to see if during the long-running scripts there are any deadlocks or blocks on the SQL Server. There are not. The issues initially started after we had installed some patches from Microsoft. We wiped a machine clean and installed Win2k3 server, then SP2, and then didn't patch anymore after that. The problem remained, so it doesn't appear to have been a patch. I'm pretty much at a loss now... does anyone have any experience with similar issues? If so, how were they fixed?

Reputation: 31

IIS 6 App Pools not responding to multiple requests / not running multi-threaded

I have a classic ASP application that has been stable for years and now we're having all kinds of problems with it. After moving the app between machines and wiping the original so we could have a fresh install of windows, we've come to the following "symptom". The app pools do not appear to allow for multiple simultaneous requests. Here's what we are seeing:

The app runs normally for most people, but when someone within one of the app pools accesses a long-running script (usually one with lots of DB access) all of the other users in the pool must wait for that script to complete. Once the script completes, everyone else's requests run. This initially made us suspect the DB connection string or something.
UNTIL... we noticed also that large file uploads into our system also cause the app pool to stop responding. What's interesting about this is that we're using the SAFileup COM+ object to do our uploads, which has a progress display in a pop-up window. When you go to upload the file, the progress display comes up, but then never refreshes to show upload progress. If you wait it out, however, the file will eventually upload and the other pending requests will process as normal.
Our app pools are in the default configuration, using the IWAM account to launch. I checked to ensure that the IWAM account has all the appropriate permissions. It does.
We've tried a variety of DB connection strings, none solved the problem (though I'm thinking it's not the DB connection string). Just in case someone thinks it is, here's our connection string: "Provider=SQLNCLI;Trusted_Connection=yes;Server=(local);Database=demo;". It couldn't be simpler. This string was previously not a problem.
I fussed with the web gardens thing and it does, indeed, make the system respond to multiple requests, but each worker thread in the garden has its own session state which causes our users to get booted when their request gets randomly assigned to a new worker thread. Only having a single worker process in the garden was never an issue before anyway.
I've used SQL Profiler and sp_who2 to see if during the long-running scripts there are any deadlocks or blocks on the SQL Server. There are not.
The issues initially started after we had installed some patches from Microsoft. We wiped a machine clean and installed Win2k3 server, then SP2, and then didn't patch anymore after that. The problem remained, so it doesn't appear to have been a patch.

I'm pretty much at a loss now... does anyone have any experience with similar issues? If so, how were they fixed?

Upvotes: 3