In previous versions of IIS whenever we needed to apply some configuration changes we used to restart IIS. Restarting IIS is the process of stopping the service and then starting it all over again. Restarting IIS used to be the only way by which we could recover a non-responsive application. However, this bad practice should be avoided. Restarting IIS drops all the sessions connected to Web server (including Internet, FTP, SMTP, and NNTP). All the data held in Web applications is lost. All Internet sites are made to be unavailable until Internet services are restarted.

There are 2 ways for restarting IIS.

·         Using the IISReset command prompt utility

·         Using the IIS Manager

Application Pool recycling is one of the features that can be an alternative to restarting IIS. This feature is the process of recycling the faulty web applications. We have the default idle time set to 20 minutes in the setting of IIS 6.0.