When it comes to managing your website traffic, one of the things to consider is the availability of your website.

IIS has a idle time-out property that is by default set to 20 minutes. This means that if no request comes for your site for 20 minutes of inactivity, IIS would kill the worker process to free-up resources. This means the memory utilised by loading of classes, session etc. This can be helpful when multiple websites may be hosted on the Server and is resource crunched.

You’ll find the below settings under the AppPool advanced settings:

So, when the next request comes to your site to access something e.g. Login page, IIS Server would again need to initialize the Worker process and load the required resources to serve that request. The first request will be slow to respond to the user because of all the initialization time required. You need to think in these terms that how much traffic usually comes to your site. If your website requires high availability, then you should consider setting the idle time-out to 0 in the App Pool settings. Or if high availability isn’t a concern, you can think for how many minutes you’d usually require your application to be available depending on the traffic.

There have been studies regarding the make or break for websites because of their initial load time. So, please be careful about this setting. Internet facing websites usually require high availability. For Intranet websites, you can think of some number of minutes based on the usage.