I worked on a very strange issue that was hard to nail down. My customer had deployed his ASP.NET 2.0 application on 4 IIS 6.0 web servers. The application worked fine on all of them but one. Let's call the servers S1,S2,S3 and S4. The average response times to requests are between 1-3 seconds on S1,S2 and S3 but greater than 45 seconds on S4. It didn't make sense as all the 4 servers were identical in configuration and the same application was running on them. Since it is the same ASP.NET appl... [More]

If you use the following directive <%@ OutputCache Duration="10" VaryByParam="*" Location="Server" %> on an .aspx page, it's possible that this can lead to an undesirable side effect when users click the back button in Internet Explorer. They will see a warning similar to Warning: Page has Expired The page you requested was created using information you submitted in a form. This page is no longer available. As a security precaution, Internet Explorer do... [More]

If you are a IIS web server administrator who is responsible for fine tuning the performance of the web server, the chances of you having to make registry changes or Metabase changes are very high. Most of these changes are usually recommendations by msdn or knowledge base articles at http://support.microsoft.com . When these articles are not followed "as is"  or incorrectly followed, this can have fatal consequences for applications running on IIS. I recently worked on an issue where brow... [More]

The client had developed an AJAX based ASP.NET 2.0 web application which had been deployed to multiple IIS 6.0 servers. On only one particular server they noticed that the application does not perform as expected. It works for a few hours and then starts to fail with the following error logged in event log. The only way to recover from the problem is to reboot the server whenever the issue occurs. Exception Type:System.Web.HttpException The remote host closed the connection. The error c... [More]