Web application times out when debugging

I’ve been working on debugging the existing web applications my new company has developed.  I had everything set up, with the appropriate web applications created and breakpoints set, but after about 90 seconds Visual Studio would return to its non-debugging state.

It turns out that as of IIS6 (I’m using IIS 7 on Windows 7), IIS now pings worker processes to make sure it is still responsive, and if not the worker process is terminated.  There is a setting, however, to control this on the app pool.

IIS 7 App Pool Advanced Settings - Ping

  1. Select the app pool for your application.  This is one of the reasons why specifying a separate app pool for each web application is a good idea.
  2. Bring up Advanced Settings.
  3. Scroll down to the Process Model section.
  4. Change the value of the Ping Enabled setting to False.  Alternately you could change the Ping Maximum Response Time (seconds) setting to a higher value, but you’ll be limited in the amount of time you have to debug, so I don’t recommend that.

JohanS has a couple of really good articles on this, which go into more detail.

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