How To Keep My Web Services Awake?

Question

I have written two web services that I am running on GoDaddy. One is a Microsoft WCF web service and the other is a RESTful Web API service. They are both working, but they rarely get traffic. If I don't call the web services for some period of time they seem to go to sleep. Then when I load the pages that call the web services they take some 20 to 30 seconds to retrieve data from the services. After that if I continue to call them repeatedly they load in just a second or two. Is this normal or did I do something wrong in my configuration? Is there some way to keep them active?

Answer 1

Entirely normal. You can either increase the recycle time limit in IIS (but you will still get recycled eventually) or you can write a quick scheduled task like the following to run every 10 minutes or so:

powershell Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://example.com"

Although I would caution that you should forcefully restart the service sometime during low usage hours just to clear the process memory / resource utilization.