Question for IIS & AWS users



  • http://forums.thedailywtf.com/Forums/ seems to suffer from having too little traffic pointing at it. Which means, on occasion, IIS seems to put the app "to sleep" and the next page load will take an annoyingly long amount of time to render.

    Questions:

    1. How do I stop IIS from putting a nearly-inactive site "to sleep"?

    2. If I do that, will I end up paying more on my AWS bill? If I can save a couple bucks a month, I'd rather just tell people to grin and bear it when it's slow to load.



  • For (1) I'd suggest a recurring task that fetches a page. Windows Task Scheduler and curl should do the trick.

    For (2) I have no idea, but you are not generating any outside traffic if you do it on localhost, so you might not have to pay extra for it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    How do I stop IIS from putting a nearly-inactive site "to sleep"?

    If you can manage the Application Pools advanced settings, it looks like you can set the Idle Time-out to 0 to disable that.

    The help text doesn't mention it, but from what I've found looking around, 0 disables it.


    I do not know anything for AWS so no clue what impact that change would have.


  • FoxDev

    For #1, this looks promising: http://forums.asp.net/post/5561710.aspx

    Edit: :hanzo:d



  • @blakeyrat said:

    If I do that, will I end up paying more on my AWS bill? If I can save a couple bucks a month, I'd rather just tell people to grin and bear it when it's slow to load.

    If it's an EC2 instance, you're paying for the time the machine is spun up, regardless of what it's doing so you shouldn't have any extra bills.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    If I do that, will I end up paying more on my AWS bill?

    Nah - based on the time the instance is up, assuming it's EC2.

    edit: :hanzo:



  • @reverendryan said:

    If it's an EC2 instance, you're paying for the time the machine is spun up, regardless of what it's doing so you shouldn't have any extra bills.

    The only thing I can think of is if it's using bandwidth while doing all that nothing, but I can't imagine what it would be using bandwidth for, so that's probably a non-issue. Disk usage I believe is already rolled-in to the AWS VM's billing.

    @loopback0 said:

    Nah - based on the time the instance is up, assuming it's EC2.

    EC2 billing is not nearly as simple as you guys seem to think it is. You also pay for incoming/outgoing bandwidth, if you want a static IP you pay for that (but oddly, only when it's not attached to a specific server), if you want to maintain a server image for backup purposes you pay for the S3 storage for that, if you have a Amazon Elastic Storage device on the server you pay for that separately, etc.

    When I get a chance I'll up the timeout to a couple hours and try that out, instead of disabling it completely.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    You also pay for incoming/outgoing bandwidth, if you want a static IP you pay for that, if you want to maintain a server image for backup purposes you pay for the S3 storage for that, if you have a Amazon Elastic Storage device on the server you pay for that separately

    Alright - fair point - but as we're talking about the instance being up in either case (IIS "asleep" vs IIS "awake" but doing nothing) then I can't see any of those making a difference in this scenario.



  • Me neither, but I don't know everything about everything and therefore I ask.

    Now I'm more confident it doesn't make a difference than I was before I posted.


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