Warm up your sites
Stefan Schackow had a great tip at the end of his PDC session “Microsoft ASP.NET 4 Core Runtime for Web Developers”. A beta extension is available for IIS 7.5 that makes IIS automatically “warm up” your web sites before any visitors arrive. This sounds to me like a pretty good solution to the problem with long and slow initial requests (EPiServer CMS experienced people will know this as the “Application is busy under initialization”-syndrom. There are a number of good posts on how you can speed up initial requests in EPiServer CMS, but with this solution you can make sure that even though your AppPool recycles every once in a while, web users are generally not affected. And it is brilliantly simple – it just launches a number of fake web requests to urls you specify when the IIS service starts or the worker has been recycled.
Download it from here
Install it
Open the control in IIS Admin
And setup the URLs you want it to call to initialize the site.
18 November 2009