From: Ross, Jason (Jason.RossGlobalCrossing.com)
Date: Fri Nov 07 2003 - 04:55:59 CST

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Ken Schaefer is reputed to have said the following:

> Rapid Fail Protection kicks in when Worker Processes fail numerous
> times in quick succession. By default this is five worker process
> failures within a 5 minute timeframe. If this happens, then the web
> application pool is shutdown until an administrator enables that
> pool. RFP can be turned off on a pool-by-pool basis. When RFP kicks
> in, a new web app pool is *not* started (in fact, a new web app pool
> is never started - all that can be started are new worker processes
> to service existing pools. New pools are created via the admin tools,
> and you assign web applications to them).
>
> Now, you might think this is some kind of DOS, but in the normal
> course of events Worker Processes should *not* be failing multiple
> times in quick succession. Such failures indicate something is very
> wrong (looking at IISState logs produced by people in the MS
> newsgroups, we can see problems related to VB "retain in memory
> settings", memory corruption, buggy OLEDB Providers/ODBC Drivers that
> cause pages to hang and so forth).
>
> In these situations, you want the website shut down permanently, so
> as not to affect the stability of the webserver as a whole, and
> websites running in other web app pools.

I would certainly agree with that. I've done a bunch of playing since
my initial post, so have a little better understanding at this point.

I can say MS has definitely gone a long way to improving their product.4
"it ain't half bad" ;0)

While your explanation of RFP contradicts the ones that a couple of other
folks have given, it most accurately fits what I've seen, and the
description
that Microsoft gives of the feature.

It is absolutely a nice feature, the problem that I have with it is that,
when creating a new website it is placed into the default application pool,
and there is no way, during the process of creation, to choose a different
one (that i can see).

This means that an admin has to be aware enough of how pools work to:

1. create the website.
2. create an application pool
3. edit the properties of the website to place it in the new pool

(where steps 1 and 2 may be done in either order)

Based on my experience, it will seldom be the case that the admin does
this, (product lit. and best practice docs notwithstanding) and if the
sites that are created _are_ placed in the same app pool and one of them
goes wonky, then all of them are shut down.

I guess that's no different that anything tech related though, it's a
great feature, but you've got to know how to use it.

For starters though, having a "which app pool do you want this website in"
screen in the new site wizard would be a beneficial addition to the product
IMO, particularly if it had 'create new' control.

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