IIS websites stop responding and iisreset gives “The data is invalid. <2147942413, 8007000d>”

Question

Question:
What is the cause of the The data is invalid. <2147942413, 8007000d> The data is invalid. <2147942413, 8007000d> error on an iisreset?

Description:
We had an issue with our IIS 7 webserver on Windows Server 2008 where a few clients received "The request channel timed out while waiting for a reply..." error indicating they were probably queued before timing out.

For a quick workaround to bring the web service back up, we did an iisreset which failed with an error:

Restart attempt failed.
The data is invalid. <2147942413, 8007000d>

This has never happened before with this server. Finally, we did a server restart and the web service was up and running again.

What was tried?
The following things were done before resorting to a server restart:

1. A backup of the applicationHost file was done to eliminate an IIS config corruption to be the cause. On comparing the backup with that of the current one after restart showed no difference.
2. Restarted the World Wide Web Publishing Service windows service and then did an iisreset but gave the same error. Pls note that an iisreset in turn stops and starts the World Wide Web Publishing Service. Tried both from the services.msc console and using net stop and net start .
3. Checked the CPU/RAM usage in Task Manager and nothing seemed abnormal
4. Checked the IIS log of that day u_xxxxxxx.log in the inetpub folder but there was nothing there to describe this error. Most of them with 200 status code and a few 401 status codes which I caused.

Answer 1

What layer of your code would propagate an error to the client? If you are getting invalid data, then you must validate the data connected to the service. Garbage in garbage out I say. I would check your CRUD operations first and be sure that you aren't swallowing exceptions within your Channel Factory.

Answer 2

In this case, wait for up to 2 mins and try again . Usually it should work after that. The cause behind this is because when you execute iisreset, it stops the app pools and then start again. While some of the app pool may be in use, it takes some time to completely stop and start again. Hope it helps.