Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.   - Kurt Vonnegut I've written several times about the importance of having a serious backup strategy for your production web server, mostly about ways to backup the Registry. But there are a few other components of a good emergency recovery strategy that are important as well. A significant percentage of developers and webmaster / administrators run production sites on production machines and have no reliable backup strategy for the components of the machine that are critical to the successful operation of IIS. The mere fact that up to now you haven't had a production server blow up on you may actually have increased the statistical likelihood that you will experience such a failure! The three critical components to be protected and backed up -- with an easy path to restore them - are the Windows Registry , the IIS Metabase , and the .NET Framework machine.config file....

I've seen a more or less constant stream of questions on the asp.net newsgroup and the asp.net site forum messageboard, all of which revolve around the problem of "Why am I losing Sessions?". (BTW that is "losing" with one o, not "loosing"! Your pants might be loose , but if your Session goes away you can bet that you are losing it!). Heres a summary of what I've learned about this; comments and additions are always welcome: If your ASP.NET application crashes, has an unhandled exception, hangs or otherwise becomes brain-dead, it will cause the application pool to recycle. Sometimes your application pool recycles for no obvious reason. This is usually a configuration issue or it may be caused by your app performing file system operations in the application directory. Many times developers incorrectly set up SqlConnections so that they aren't properly closed and returned to the connection pool, and this can also cause your AppPool to recycle un...