Can you prevent your ASP.NET application from shutting down?

Question

I think I heard that ASP.NET applications will shut down after a while of being idle (i.e. no visitors).

Is there a way to prevent this behavior from happening? I h

Answer 1

Besides external keep alive you can make an internal keep alive inside global.asax:

    static Thread keepAliveThread = new Thread(KeepAlive);

    protected void Application_Start()
    {
        keepAliveThread.Start();
    }

    protected void Application_End()
    {
        keepAliveThread.Abort();
    }

    static void KeepAlive()
    {
        while (true)
        {
            WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create("http://www.mywebsite.com/DummyPage.aspx");
            req.GetResponse();
            try
            {
                Thread.Sleep(60000);
            }
            catch (ThreadAbortException)
            {
                break;
            }
        }
    }