Web application's startup delay resolved with ASP.NET 4.0 and IIS 7.5

One of the problems I experienced while developing ASP.NET/SharePoint applications is the warm-up latency. Every time the application pool is recycled, the first user to hit the website get a very slow response time or even a timeout. This is due to all the initialization code inside application_start() and it's worsen if there is set of back-end WCF services. The solution has always been to make a script that maintains the web applications up and running, or to only recycle the application pool once during the night (I really don't like this one).

Looks like IIS7.5/ASP.NET4.0 have solved the initialization delay quite nicely, by auto-starting the application pool as quickly as possible. I guess this is a good excuse to move from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 ! Check out the whitepaper: http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/aspnet40Beta1/#_Toc223325464