Okay, i have a vps plan with multiple websites on it and i am using the webstats and webmail. from time to time i experience a server application unavailable when i try to access the webmail or webstats. After reading some posts i created three different application pools, one for all my websites, one for webstats and one for webmail.

My question: do you think this is the best direction to run the appPool and what would you recommend for my settings within each appPool. I want to maximize my memory and my server efficiency.

In my experience here administering Windows 2003 servers, this should be fine. The overhead for an application pool is pretty low, so you having three total won't hurt.

One thing to be aware of with application pools is the asp.net version of any sites in them. If you are using asp.net, you can't have two sites with different versions in the same application pool - the pool will crash. Not sure what your dev environment is, but I thought I would point that out just in case.



-Dave

My application pool for smartermail goes down alot, what setting am i not configuring right, i want to make sure if the application pool for smartermail goes down that it recycles by itself. what should i set to make sure it recycles when pool gets overwhelmed.

setting i have are
tab Recycling
- check off Recycle worker processess (in minutes) : 1740
- Memory recycling - checked off Maximum used memory in megabytes : 50

tab performance
- check off Shutdown worker processes after being idle for : 10
- check off Limit the kernal request queue : 1000
- Web garden Maximum number of worker processes : 1

tab Health
- check off enable pinging : 30
- check off enable rapid fail protection : failures: 5 : time period :5
- startup time limit Worker process must startup : 90
- shutdown time limiti : 90


what am i missing or do i have something set wrong, i want to make sure that it recycles if it gets over runned

Help

If your check is off it won't do it. 50 megs is pretty low for an App Pool. My App Pools reach 300+ Megs. Are you on a broke mans 256 Meg VPS? I would raise your ceiling to around 100 Megs.

Another setting that might be handy is the option to recycle at a specific time. If you know that people won't be using mail at a given time, maybe early AM, you can configure an app pool to recycle then. That is something I have done in the past for problematic pools.

I agree that 50MB is kinda small as well, especially for smartermail. Depends on the number of users too though... My experience is from seeing it mostly in a shared environment, where it can get quite beefy