For the past three weeks our website has had issues staying up. When the site goes down, a user who requests the site will sit and wait, and eventually they will get a timeout error.
Basically the website will stay live without any issues for minutes, hours, or even days. But then, at some seemingly arbitrary moment, the website will go down. If I was to let things be, the website will stay down for 1-30 minutes and then come back up again all of sudden. This cycle will continue sometimes for hours on end (going down/coming-up in 1-30 minute intervals).
The only clue that I have is restarting IIS magically fixes the problem for hours or even days. Usually when I notice that the site is stuck in the "down/up state" I described before, I restart IIS and we can have hours or days of uninterrupted service.
I will tell you what I know:
1. Doesn't seem to be a network/host provider issue - We have done some tests with our host and we are having no issues reaching them. Plus, if it were a network issue restarting IIS would not help.
2. Nothing useful in the MySQL error log.
3. Nothing useful in the server event error logs.
4. The applications our developers have built do not seem to be throwing any suspicious errors.
5. I was expecting IIS to give me something in the error log, but it doesnt. The only thing that I have seen is the "Timer_Connection_Idle" error, but apparently that is nothing to fuss over, and besides, we have had those errors months before we had this site issue.
6. Connections are being closed to our database. I have been monitoring the connections made to MySQL from the website, and they seem to be opening and closing within a reasonable amount of time.
7. The average load on the server doesn't seem to be high, so I don't think its another process hogging up resources.
8. Restarting the IIS service will fix the issue for at least a few hours.
9. When I RDC into our server and try to access the website during "down times" (via localhost in a browser) I still am unable to access the site with one exception. It *seems* as though the static pages (raw html pages not using application code) *are* accessible via localhost on the server, but those same pages are inaccessible to the outside world. Since the website is so intermittent, I could be wrong on this last observation.
10. Some of the pages in our website are written in a cgi handler using an ODBC connector. There are a couple pages which have been overhauled to use Connector/NET 5.2.2. We use IIS 6.0 as our webserver and MySQL v 1.2.11 as our db.
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks.
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