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by tszming 4421 days ago
Besides the fact that you are using the free ClearDB plan which is not supposed for production use (and it is not related to Microsoft anyway), Azure website (shared) is a preview product [1], with no SLA, you should not consider them for any serious use anyway, so you've made two mistakes here.

[1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites
3 comments
primitivesuave 4421 days ago
Microsoft is trying to compete in a very crowded space, so if the preview product sucks I doubt developers would be willing to try the production version. They should be making their preview a pain-free process that generates positive PR, rather than cutting off a site when the plan gets overutilized.
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dav-id 4421 days ago
Not only is the shared tier a preview product it also releases itself from memory when inactive which results in a slow warm up after this happens and a visitor lands on your site.

Great for a personal blog but for a business where your customers expect things instantly, it is not so good.

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pionar 4421 days ago
> it also releases itself from memory when inactive.

That's the nature of application pools in IIS. If the app pool goes inactive for a time, IIS kills the w3wp process running the app. You can set the timeout in the web.config (not in front of code right now, don't know the exact incantations). Does WAWS respect that?

Though, the shutdown would be a good thing for a small site like what WAWS is intended for, because when the site isn't running, it's not still using resources.

In my company's environment (our own datacenter), our monitoring tools keep the app pool from "timing out" because it hits a status page every 2 minutes. We manually (through a script) recycle app pools at a given time every night.

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ahmelsayed 4421 days ago
While that is absolutely true for IIS and the Shared tier in Azure Websites (although it's fully configurable if you own the IIS box[1]), Dedicated tiers (when you own the whole VM) in Azure have a feature called Always On[2] Where there is no idle Time-out on the app itself, so even if the app remained idle for days, w3wp process won't be killed. Also if the app happen to shutdown for any reason (machine restart, Azure Update, Windows Update, app crash, etc) Azure Websites will make sure to send a request to the app to start it up and warm it, then the app can use Application Initialization[3] to do any more complex warmup

[1] http://serverfault.com/a/595215/219792

[2] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-...

[3] http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/whats-new-in-iis-8/iis-...

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anilmujagic 4421 days ago
You don't need to have external tool to keep the AppPool from timing out: right-click AppPool in IIS Manager > Advanced Settings > Idle Time-out: set to zero. Also, you don't need the script to reset it at certain time: right-click AppPool in IIS Manager > Recycling... > Specific time(s).
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tiffanyh 4421 days ago
Does anyone have experience with ClearDB?

Good, bad, why would you use it?

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