Best Practices for AppPools for ASP.NET Apps in IIS6 and IIS7

Question

My company is currently using IIS6 to run ASP.NET applications but will eventually use IIS7. Are there any recommended practices for AppPools that can be implemented now in IIS6 that will carry over to IIS7? For example, should we begin using AppPool custom identities in IIS6?

Answer 1

First question is "does it matter?" In most cases, whatever you do vis-a-vis app pools will not be carried over to IIS7 because most admins would not upgrade in place so you would have to recreate things, at least to some extent.

Insofar as what IIS7 does differently, the only thing that comes to mind is that IIS7 puts each site in it's own pool by default, which is a very, very good thing to do manually on IIS6.

Both also have a default 20 minute app pool idle timeout and a daily recycle which, if your apps are purely managed (ASP.NET with no COM dependencies), makes little sense -- that is a holdover from the era of ASP.OLD when you needed to recycle the web server for self-defensive fitness. I would advise removing these limits and seeing how things go -- if you need to restore the recycle, you always can. And both IIS6 and IIS7 give you some other options to force a recycle should it become necessary.