In IIS, the default is to shut down the worker process after 20 minutes of inactivity? What is the rational behind it? It seems like people go to lunch, then come back forcing a reload of everything.
Specifically in regards to a .NET 4, ASP.NET MVC, C# app. Is there any reason to have the idle timeout enabled?
To save server resources.
If the server is dedicated to only serving up a single site, then it's not that big of a deal, but if you are hosting many sites, and some sites are rarely hit, then there's no reason to have an application pool that is constantly idling, and taking up valuable resources.
Another good reason is that there's always the possibility the code can have a memory leak. If it does and the process is never recycled, then it will eventually bring down the entire server.
I'm sure there are other reasons as well, those are the first ones that come to mind.
That option is designed especially for a scenario where you have many applications running on your IIS server and some of them are used infrequently. If you have just a handful of applications then the idle timeout isn't of much use.
