Request Timeouts on Initial Run - Explanation Needed
We've been upgrading our 5.0 websites to 6.3 over the last several weeks and we are noticing one issue that is a little concerning. Per the documentations recommendation, the application pools that run our Sitefinity sites are recycled nightly. We do this at 4:00am est. After this occurs, all of our 6.3 sites receive a Request Time out error for the first couple of minutes after this occurs. Our 5.0 sites do not have this issue. We also have service hit our homepage every two minutes so the site never spins down until we do the scheduled recycle, but still the pages that are not hit by the service get timeouts until they are hit. In addition, we use Xenu's Link Sleuth as a link checker and we have noticed that over half the site will return timeouts on underlying pages but if we go to those pages they display just fine. We end up having to run the link checker multiple times before all of the timeouts go away. Our goal is to have the site up at all times so having these timeouts occur at all isn't something we want to see. Our 5.0 sites do not have this timeout issue on Xenu's Link Sleuth at all.
I know there has been a lot of changes since 5.0 to 6.3 and we are already getting good results as far users talking about performance but we'd like an answer as to why this is happening and if there is a setting in Sitefinity we can change to fix this.
I don't have any sites recycling nightly...never had a problem, have you considered just not doing that? We've got heavy traffic sites running 24x7 for a month (till patch day) with no problems at all.
(Also, running 32-bit app pool?...helps keep the sites resources down, and its faster)
Thank you for the response!
We had issues with 5.0 and without the recycle we would have to recycle our heaviest hit sites during the day so they would behave properly. We also are running our sites in 64-bit mode as the 32-bit mode was causing our sites to recycle more often because it would max out the amount of memory available for the worker process. We've noticed that running in 64-bit mode is faster. We are currently running 12 sites on 12-core, 32 GB server so we have plenty of resources available.
The two sources of recommendations from Sitefinity are:
www.sitefinity.com/.../recommended-environment-settings-for-sitefinity
www.sitefinity.com/.../tips-for-optimizing-performance