Hi guys

Whilst I'm searching google on this, I thought I'd ask the question here anyway - it doesn't already seem to have been asked.

[If google returns the solution, of course, I'll post it here]

I'm using IIS6 on W2003 Standard edition.  However, I was running IIS4 last week with the same problem so I suppose it's not version specific.  The server, BTW, has plenty of capacity (without going in to detail).

Every now and again, ASP just seems to stop working on the server.  Any page that runs an ASP script will not show in the browser and no error will be displayed.  I just get a timer bar waiting for the page to load.  No errors seem to be written to the Windows or IIS logs about this.  It is always cured by simply restarting the WWW service and then ASP starts working again.  When it's working, everything works great.

Any ideas how I can investigate where the problem lays?  Any good ASP monitoring tools / techniques I could use.

Thanks for any hints.

Gareth

is it any ASP page or a certain one?

sounds to me like its some out of control code of yours....

"asp not working" is simply not a common problem

Thanks for replying.

I'm almost certain it's my code - it must be.  But, what code?  All the pages that run run fine unless the problem has occurred.  Running the common pages, even under heavy use, doesn't trigger the problem.  It just seems to happen.

It doesn't happen during the weekends or of an evening though when there's very light use.  But some times I can have over 400 people connected and there's no problem, sometimes 200 people and there is a problem.  I'm perplexed.

The reason I'm not getting very far with google is because I don't know quite what I'm looking for (no error codes!).

Thanks

Gareth

well, all i can do to help is provide you with something that i ran into on my site

i am running some version of WWG that is based on 6.34 (whatever was out May of 2002)....  i was having this exact problem you speak of. something would happen on the server where BAM, some piece of code would spin the server out of control and prevent it from serving up pages in the exact manor you describe

i couldn't track this because i had absolutely no where to start, what to look for, etc

then by blind luck one day, there was a thread in a forum on my site that people could duplicate this happening..... clicking to open up this one thread send CPU use through the roof and locked everyone out.....

so i inspected the thread in SQL's query anaylzer.. all looked good.... then i started looking at the 3 people who had participated in that thread.....  one guy was trying to use [QUOTE] in his signature (i dont have the WYSIWIG feature turned on my site)... so i took out the guy's sig, and what do you know, all was well again.....

i have modified the WWG code so much that i have no idea if this issue was my doing or not, but regardless, i now totally strip out that "forum code" in people's signatures.....  it was just absolutely blind and dumb luck that i ran across the issue to be able to fix it

ws that reply directed to me?

if so, it was just in the "Replace" code i guess that is part of the forum, it totally choked when it saw it in the signature... i just knew what the problem was and had to fix it, so i went route B and disallowed that particular forum code instead of finding out "why" it spun the server

@MorningZ

It would be very handy to know exactly what the code was that was causing the error so I can see if I have it anywhere.  I know I've used the ASP replace() command extensively throughout my apps but testing always seem to show no problems.

I'm experimenting with the Web Application Stress tool and hopefully this will help track it down.

Could it be due to my heavy use of Access databases?  I have several databases and several connections to each loading on the home page of the site (heavy traffic).  Or would you expect to see a specific error if it was related to db access.

I really need this sorting as I'll be leaving my current job soon and don't want to leave my replacement with the problem of fixing some unknown portions of my code.

@dpyers

I'll double check all those, thanks.  I'm usually pretty good at remembering to do this though.

However, is there a way I can tell what connections have been left open - rather than going through my code manually to check.  Maybe some kind of include file inserted at the end would report the status?  That would be really handy.

Afraid I don't know of any tool like that.

Really just grasping at straws here. On the off chance that this is an iis or other process related problem rather than an asp one, you may want to check task manager to see if there's any WSH stuff running. Disable anti-virus script checking. Look in SMTP subdirs for possible problems. Shut down MSDE if running, yada yada yada...

@FeRnAN

That's interesting.

I've not really looked at the debugging options before.  Both boxes were unticked unfortunately so I don't think that was causing the hang.  I've enabled debugging to see if that throws anything up.

From what I've read, it will slow the server down, but the server is super fast right now (when working) anyway so I doubt anyone will notice.

Funnily enough though, I've not had a single hang for the last couple of days.  So, when it next happens, the following day, I look at the previous days logs line by line around the time of the problem and examine every page that was accessed at that time.  Hopefully I may spot something.

Thanks for your post (and love your signature!)

Gareth