Hi!

I have a W2K server running with IIS server. The machine is quite
powerful (2x Xeon CPU, 2GB RAM etc.) and it serves about 1400
websites. The problem I have is, as I realized on Google groups, quite
common. The IIS itself keeps crashing randomly once a day. The only
thing I can do is IIS restart.

The config and current set of the machine is:
- W2K Server SP3
- all patches yet released
- .NET Framework 1.0 SP2
- security settings made by a security company

The problem is that the server was running fine for 4 months. After
.NET SP2 installation and one of the MS fixes started to behave
strangely. The IIS crashed just for one second and it used to restart
itself. After the last MS hotfix released, the server started to crash
completely.

I have made these tests:

- DLL test for "retain in memory" option - negative
- metabase corrupted - negative
- HDD and RAM test - negative
- ASP scripts check from IIS logs - negative
- IIS Crash/Hang agent - no result (kept crashing IIS 4 times a day,
removed)
- MDAC version check - negative
- network failures - negative

I also installed the IIS Exception Monitor and Windows Debug tools.
Also, I've installed the Symbols. But, as ususal (sorry, Bill), none
of those is working. It says "access denied" or "symbols are
missmatched". No useful info, though.

After a month of investigation, I'm hopeless. The only thing that
comes to me is uninstallation of the .NET Framework (the SP2 cannot be
uninstalled itself - or I didn't find the way how to do that). But
this cannot be done as many customers use it. I'm desperate.

Please, help! I really, really don't want to reinstall the machine and
go through the migration process again :(.

Thanks in advance!
DD

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Clarification of Question by doesntmatter-ga on 29 Jun 2003 22:46 PDT

Just a small detail I forgot yesterday:

- there is no entry in the Event log at the crash time (nor
before/after)
- also, there's nothing even when I changed the logging settings for
W3SVC to ASPErrorsToNTLog = 1 (no critical ASP errors)

Now it's complete ..
DT

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Clarification of Question by doesntmatter-ga on 30 Jun 2003 01:54 PDT

And one more note:

Today I managed to run the debug tools (finally). The problem is, I
can work with the server only via TSC, so:

- adplus -iis -crash --> not working via TSC on W2K server
- IISstate --> not working via TSC on W2K server

When I tried to run Debugging tools and attach to the inetinfo
process, it was successful, I got some huge output, but suddenly the
IIS has crashed! When I stopped the debugger, it resumed working.

Now I think I've done everything possible. The last chance is to
uninstall SP2 for .NET. Then I'm lost :(.

Sorry for spamming ..

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Clarification of Question by doesntmatter-ga on 13 Jul 2003 09:17 PDT

Finally - found it .. it was one customer's file with IFRAME and ASP
combination .. it's been over two weeks since the last crash.

Also, it might be the SP4 installation that solved it :).

Thanks anyway for help!
DT

What sort of programs are running on the machine?  There are a lot of
things that can cause crashes in IIS.  Have you looked over
performance counters to see if there is any specific culprit?

Are there a lot of apps doing heavy data access with MS Access?

There is one more application on the server and that's the
StatisticsServer from Deepmetrix. But the software is OK, never had
any issue.

I did some performance monitoring two days ago (luckilly, the server
has been working since Friday, when I found one website that was using
IFRAME to load another page from different location and was refreshing
itself every 3 seconds; removed the HTML code and the server stays -
up to now) and was totally OK. I did some tests someone was suggesting
on Google Groups (inetinfo - private bytes and virtual bytes, plus
CPU, MEM usage and network counter) but no strange result given. The
machine is running app. at 5 % of CPU all day, in the peak about 14 %.
Memory the same.

Regarding the MS Access - don't know. A lot of people use MDB files
(about 100) but I have no idea how I could investigate the usage and
data amount used.

Thanks anyway ...
DT

btw: the server is clean, no additional programs running, just the
W2K/IIS server and StatisticsServer .. nothing else.