It’s getting pretty rare that I have problems with my Web server, but last night IIS died on my server box. A web app dying is not quite that uncommon – it happens about once a week or so – but in normal cases I use my West Wind Web Monitor on the server which auto-restarts the Web service and things keep on running with only a minor hiccup.

However, a couple of times in the last few months this hasn’t worked. IIS died HARD. Apparently IIS died sometime last night around midnight when I got a string of notifications from West Wind Web Monitor. Unfortunately I didn’t see those until this morning...

West Wind Web Monitor will let me know when a failure occurs, email on failure and then also fire off a batch file to restart IIS if the error is repeatable. Usually this results in 2 messages emailed per URL monitored: A site down message and a site back up message a minute or so later. If I see paired messages I know pretty much the problem took care of itself.

Both of the local sites that are checked – the West Wind Web Store and the Home Page died right around Midnight and didn’t come right back up. The rest of the checks are from this morning when I finally got around to checking the sites and tried to restart IIS.

However, this time around IIS wouldn’t restart. IISReset would take a few minutes to run and when it was done – without error – IIS still wouldn’t come back up. I checked the event log and there too – no errors of any sort.

I ended up rebooting the system and all is fine.

Has anybody seen this sort of thing before? It seems like this has been a more recent thing - it only started a few months ago. Hmmm... I guess I should check when I threw .NET 2.0 on the box, but I think the last failure was before that...