IIS 7.0 - Application Request Routing (ARR)

Re: II7/ARR App Pool Idle Thread Timeout

JAltrichter — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:55:12 GMT

Thanks again for the follow-up.

Perhaps my case is a little different, because we are deploying our first IIS7 as an ARR so the learning curve has been two-fold. However, the part the I have found frustrating is not so much the how, but the why. There is a lot of 'click here' but not so much information about what’s happening when you do that.Also when searching for ARR some our the pre-release V1 docs blog posts pop up, which is a little confusing until you sort it out. For instance, your blog post from July 11^th2008 keeps coming up as one of the top resource for ‘ARR SSL’ configuration.Lastly, the topic for which I would have most wanted to see a 'click here' document, was only covered in a forum discussion: terminating multiple SSL's across single and multiple server farms. All in all, we have been able to keep this project moving and make a lot of headway in a short time-frame, but there have been a few wrong turns along the way.Jim

Re: II7/ARR App Pool Idle Thread Timeout

JAltrichter — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:54:24 GMT

Thanks again for the follow-up. Perhaps my case is a little different, because we are deploying our first IIS7 as an ARR so the learning curve has been two-fold. However, the part the I have found frustrating is not so much the how, but the why. There is a lot of 'click here' but not so much information about what’s happening when you do that.Also when searching for ARR some our the pre-release V1 docs blog posts pop up, which is a little confusing until you sort it out. For instance, your blog post from July 11^th2008 keeps coming up as one of the top resource for ‘ARR SSL’ configuration.Lastly, the topic for which I would have most wanted to see a 'click here' document, was only covered in a forum discussion: terminating multiple SSL's across single and multiple server farms. All in all, we have been able to keep this project moving and make a lot of headway in a short time-frame, but there have been a few wrong turns along the way.Jim

Re: II7/ARR App Pool Idle Thread Timeout

wonyoo — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:11:44 GMT

Thanks - but I am afraid that there are no plans for such book. :)

However, I am curious to know if you have describe your challenges with finding the documentation. I would like to see if we can make things better/easier.

With every release milestone, we publish articles on iis.net. For ARR, they are:

ARRv1: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/489/using-the-application-request-routing-module/

ARRv2 Beta1:http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/570/application-request-routing-version-2/

While above articles walkthrough and highlight the main features, they are not what you would consider to be product documentation.

With RTW release, we do provide online help contents on technet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd443531(WS.10).aspx and we also provide contextual link to the technet documents from the product (ie. The help links in ARR product will take you to the relevant docs on technet.

Please provide us feedback on how we can make this better.

Thanks.

Re: II7/ARR App Pool Idle Thread Timeout

JAltrichter — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:57:47 GMT

Thanks! I appreciate the quick response.

ARR is a really great technology, it has just been a little tough finding the documentation. I'll be looking for ARR Essentials by Won Yoo coming soon to an online book store.

Re: II7/ARR App Pool Idle Thread Timeout

wonyoo — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:44:04 GMT

ARR does not set this value automatically. However, it is the recommended setting for deploying ARR in production.

Functionally speaking, this value has no impact on how ARR works. The idle time-out is designed to bring down the worker process in order to free up more memory. (The default value is 20 min. So for example, if you have multiple sites/applications in multiple applications pools, and if there has been no activity on one of them, IIS will bring down the worker process - so that other processes/etc can consume the resource on the machine.)

Since ARR is proxying the all requests to the content/application servers behind it, we recommend that the worker process is running all the time. (That said, if there is a constant flow traffic, then the worker process would be running all the time, irrespective of this value. ie. It won't be idle for 20 min.)

Won

II7/ARR App Pool Idle Thread Timeout

JAltrichter — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:34:03 GMT

I have seen multiple articles and hands-on-labs state that IIS7/ARR servers should set the Application Pool - Idle Thread Timeout to 0 inorder to disable the time-out, but I haven't found a good explanation of why that is the case.

Is this a testing / demonstration issue to better illustrate how ARR works or is this recomended guidance for deploying ARR in production? Also under what condition other than zero load would an ARR thread terminate (possibly prematurely).

Jim