IIS – Gallery Server

Eliminate startup delay by suspending the app pool and using Application Initialization

By Roger Martin| 2016-12-01T16:37:42+00:00 January 15th, 2014|Tips & Tricks|4 Comments

[2015-10-19] This post was updated to describe changes present in IIS 8.5 (Windows Server 2012 R2): the addition of the Idle Worker Process Page-Out feature and the removal of the Start Automatically setting. It is well known that ASP.NET applications have a startup delay after they’ve been idle for a while. Every once in a while someone posts in the forum that the gallery is slow to load at first and then is quite fast. That’s because IIS is doing a lot of stuff when that first HTTP request comes in: Spins up an application pool JIT-compiles the code Performs view generation of the EF model Loads HTTP modules Runs initialization code in GSP, which connects to the database and loads application settings and other lookup data. All that takes a few seconds, which isn’t terrible, but first impressions are important. Wouldn’t it be better if IIS handled this before [...]

Microsoft patch available for IIS 7 and 7.5 bug

By Roger Martin| 2016-12-01T16:37:45+00:00 October 21st, 2013|Bugs|0 Comments

[Update Oct 31, 2013]: A user pointed out—and I was able to confirm—that SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 fixes this issue, so you don’t need the hotfix if you apply SP1. I don’t know whether service packs for other OS’s include the fix. Gallery Server Pro uses Web.API for many kinds of AJAX callbacks when users interact with the gallery. For example, when you click the area around a thumbnail image, the gallery makes an AJAX call to the server to retrieve the meta items by issuing a GET request similar to this: http://site.com/gs/api/mediaitems/617/meta As you can see, the URL doesn’t contain a file extension. That is how Web.API is designed and it’s nice and clean. However, a bug in IIS 7 and IIS 7.5 causes extensionless URLs to fail in certain circumstances. See if you are affected There are a few ways to identify if you are affected [...]