I've tried to solve this through a support ticket, but I'm not really getting a satisfactory answer. I see this error message popping up from time to time in the forum and don't really see a conclusion. I've been running BlogEngine on a site for over a year. Everything has been perfectly fine. I just started getting the 503 error message. I haven't changed anything at all in the meantime. Support tells me it's my issue - must be something in the software. When I go into your control panel to recycle the application pool, I get a generic error message page, which is pretty suspicious. Seems like the server is having trouble recycling? After the recycling error message, I'm able to access a few pages, then get the error message again. This is a very low traffic website - around 20 visitors per day. I'm using a popular software package that I haven't modified. If the application pool recycles because of your utilization rules, shouldn't the application be available again after it recycles? This isn't the case. It seems I have to manually recycle it in the control panel. Is that normal? I have dozens of sites hosted with you and have been very happy. I find this situation very odd, though. The ticket is [329-1674534C-5F2A]
As a follow up - I went another few rounds with Tech Support and didn't get much further. I've moved the entire site to a VPS. I didn't change a thing except for the connection string. The site, and blog, runs perfectly. No problems or excessive resource utilization. I'm kind of disappointed to not have received any response to this post.
Hi, I went over the ticket that you mentioned, and the application is recycling because it's exceeded both the CPU and memory limit thresholds. You can try upgrading your hosting plan to see if that will help resolve the 503 errors. You will at least have more memory available to your application. I did a little research on the problem, and it appears the problem may be the application itself and is not isolated to our shared hosting environment: http://blogengine.codeplex.com/workitem/12177 Here is a blog which may help you optimize it a bit further for a shared hosting environment by pre-compiling the assemblies: http://dotnamics.com/mortens-blog/post/BlogEngine-net-as-a-web-application.aspx Comparing a VPS to a shared hosting environment is like comparing apples to oranges because on a VPS, you have access to 100% CPU utilization and whatever amount of memory available to you. Unfortunately, we cannot tell you exactly what may be causing the problem as we are not the developers.
I ended up solving the problem by moving the site to a different (non-Winhost) server. I just copied all of the files over, so it was clearly a problem with the server.
Thanks TKStom. It looks like I'll be doing the same. They want to say it's part of the server functionality and point the finger at the code when the code hasn't changed in over a year. If you like the hosting company you are with now, please let me know who it is.
It is not a "problem with the server" when an application requires more resources than a plan allows. You can upgrade to a plan with more memory, or move to a VPS, the result is the same; you are providing more memory to the application. Why something as simple as a blog would need to utilize over 200mb of memory is another question. But only the application developers could answer that.
