Restarting Servers
- Thread starter Bliss
- Start date
WineIsGood
Perch
Welcome to the world of Microsoft software. 
Well, I have a counter on my site using global.asa, and the counter gets reset every time the server is restarted. I also have it displaying when the server restarts, and that's like, well, every other day, so that's how I noticed. Either that or I have some really weird things happening with my code (Which happens. The other day, the server refused to process includes in one of my pages, and when I reuploaded my file, it worked).
I'm sorry, I made a mistake. Our Unix servers are not restarted that often. Windows is a different case. We do a daily or weekly reboot (depending on circumstances) of win, win2 and win4. As I said, this takes less than 60 seconds and almost every windows host concerned about system performance does it.
Global.asa sessions are supposed to end clean with a reboot. Just so you know when doing a reboot of a Windows server we do not just click restart. We stop Web Service, MS SQL, and CF prior to a reboot.
Take last night for instance on the Win Server memory was almost at 100% usage now we are talking about 2 GBs of memory, an hour before that it was at 70% but it usually clears out between 10 pm and 6 am so it is not usually a problem. We decided we were going to need to stop and restart web service in most cases that will clear the memory issue. So we proceed through our shut down procedure which is designed to gracefully shutdown the services wait then restart. Well the shutdown occurs in about 40 seconds and then a pause then the restart of Web Services. Well guess what IIS does not fully restart and I have a feeling why because someone was not watching to make sure all the DLLHost processes were stopped. Anyway the restart does not go well. So another shutdown of Web Service is attempted of course you now have a server that is unstable if you were to perform a reboot now in all likely the server is not going to come back up. So now we have to begin trying to stop services individually FTP, SMTP and Web Service. But guess what they wont stop they are hung. So now you begin using the kill command and you have to identify all processes associated with W3SVC etc and kill them off. Now you are talking at least 45 minutes that sites have been unavailable. Finally you get all the processes stopped and now all you can do is reboot the server. And all comes back fine and dandy.
The reason I say all of this is because this series of events is caused by someone's poorly written code that does not end sessions or even worse they intentionally have running processes. This forces us to restart windows services at such regular intervals
If you are having a Global.asa problem then you might want to examine your code. I think your process is one of the processes we have to manually terminate. You are suppose to have a clean termination procedure where you save any essential data.
Take last night for instance on the Win Server memory was almost at 100% usage now we are talking about 2 GBs of memory, an hour before that it was at 70% but it usually clears out between 10 pm and 6 am so it is not usually a problem. We decided we were going to need to stop and restart web service in most cases that will clear the memory issue. So we proceed through our shut down procedure which is designed to gracefully shutdown the services wait then restart. Well the shutdown occurs in about 40 seconds and then a pause then the restart of Web Services. Well guess what IIS does not fully restart and I have a feeling why because someone was not watching to make sure all the DLLHost processes were stopped. Anyway the restart does not go well. So another shutdown of Web Service is attempted of course you now have a server that is unstable if you were to perform a reboot now in all likely the server is not going to come back up. So now we have to begin trying to stop services individually FTP, SMTP and Web Service. But guess what they wont stop they are hung. So now you begin using the kill command and you have to identify all processes associated with W3SVC etc and kill them off. Now you are talking at least 45 minutes that sites have been unavailable. Finally you get all the processes stopped and now all you can do is reboot the server. And all comes back fine and dandy.
The reason I say all of this is because this series of events is caused by someone's poorly written code that does not end sessions or even worse they intentionally have running processes. This forces us to restart windows services at such regular intervals
If you are having a Global.asa problem then you might want to examine your code. I think your process is one of the processes we have to manually terminate. You are suppose to have a clean termination procedure where you save any essential data.
StPatrick
Perch
Actually both yorri and Wine are right. "Bad" programming leads to server problem. For example, at my work place we hadn't rebooted our servers (none of them - not web, not mail, not domain, etc.) for more than a year. Of course, there are no ASP sites published on them except my one, and I never placing objects in Sessions or Application (which cause the most problems usually).
On other hand, there is some bug I think on Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server. IIS is not restarting separately (yes, though it says it is), I mean restarting IIS doesn't bring down the service, it somehow still locks it in memory, so no resources are freed. On Windows 2000 Pro, it works good though that's why I think it is a bug. Also it works good on Windows 2003 Standard Server as long as I tested it.
On other hand, there is some bug I think on Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server. IIS is not restarting separately (yes, though it says it is), I mean restarting IIS doesn't bring down the service, it somehow still locks it in memory, so no resources are freed. On Windows 2000 Pro, it works good though that's why I think it is a bug. Also it works good on Windows 2003 Standard Server as long as I tested it.
StPatrick
Perch
Have no idea - Sessions managed better? Or maybe no that bug present (if it is a bug)?FreeWilly said:
They can't have the same bugs, lol. Linux has its own problems, Windows its own, and other OSs too.BTW, here is a way to check if the bug I was talking about is present or not. Add a new path to System paths (not user's), then restart IIS. Add some ActiveX (or use existing one), but place one of its required DLLs to the path you added. See if you can load that ActiveX from ASP code. Now, this is a programmer's view, maybe you can do it some another way, I dunno.
The point here, that EVERY program on Windows reloads paths only when it starts, same goes to IIS (since it is no more than a program). I could load the test ActiveX on Win2000 Pro, but it didn't worked on Server and Adv. Server, which *probably* means that IIS is not unloaded from memory when restarting and that's why I'm saying that this is a bug.
Ripcurlsurf
Guppy
Thats a lot of resets. Have you thought about finding the poor asp programmers who dont close their database properly.
