IIS7 - only serves up one page at a time. It's a making me crAzY!

Question

Situation: Classic ASP application, using a custom Application Pool. Default settings.

On some IIS7 machines, IIS decides to serve only one page at a time.

Answer 1

Are you sure you don't have a dependency in your code which is causing the deadlock. I've seen this before where logging, sql connections etc creates a dependency. Use perfmon and check the hard disk read/write queue, memory read/write queue to see if things are backing up.

I would highly recommend Tess Ferrandez's (ASP.NET Escalation Engineer - Microsoft) blog for lots in insights and way to find out what is happening. Tess has forgotten more about this stuff than most people will ever know.

I think your problem is not IIS related but something in your app, probably in your ActiveX component. Make sure you clean up after your ActiveX component. Here's a piece of code I use to clean up after using Excel (Another Com component). Remember Com is not managed.

    Private Sub ShutDownExcel()
    If objExcel IsNot Nothing Then
        objExcel.DisplayAlerts = True
        objExcel.Quit()
        System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(objExcel)
        objExcel = Nothing
    End If

    ' Clean up memory so Excel can shut down. 
    GC.Collect()
    GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers()

    ' The GC needs to be called twice in order to get the 
    ' Finalizers called - the first time in, it simply makes 
    ' a list of what is to be finalized, the second time in, 
    ' it actually the finalizing. Only then will the 
    ' object do its automatic ReleaseComObject. 
    GC.Collect()
    GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers()
End Sub

Hope this helps.