Website hangs, lockups, requests queueing in ExecuteRequestHandler, slow requests, website not responding. This is the most common, and most frustrating problem that many production IIS websites experience on a regular basis.
It is also the number one reason that users begin using LeanSentry.
(Not surprisingly, LeanSentry Hang diagnostics was the very first diagnostic I wrote for LeanSentry, and my original motivation for creating LeanSentry in the first place.)
To commemorate over 10 years of LeanSentry Hang diagnostics, we wrote an updated guide to resolving IIS and ASP.NET hangs.
What causes hangs?
While hangs are specific to your application, they are all caused by some kind of resource exhaustion triggered by a bottleneck in your application code.
This is why most hangs only happen in production, and are nearly impossible to reproduce in a test environment.
This is why guessing at the causes, code review, and optimizing the application is highly unlikely to resolve your hangs unless you happen to get supremely lucky and find the exact code that’s causing it.
The reason why LeanSentry Hang diagnostics are so effective at resolving hangs, is precisely because they analyze the application at the exact moment of the hang.
As a result, what the hang diagnostic sees is the exact code causing the hang. And this code is often something you totally didn’t expect, like a logging library, or a lock in some minor part of the code.
The good news is, that often makes FIXING the hang a one- or two-line change of code. But only because you know the exact line to change.
The step-by-step guide to fixing hangs
We recently put together a quick guide on how to use LeanSentry Hang diagnostics to definitively fix website hangs.
It covers:
- Why hangs typically only happen in production.
- How to monitor IIS websites for hangs.
- What typically causes hangs.
- How to use LeanSentry Hang diagnostics to determine the exact cause of the hang, and the application code that’s triggering it.
Head over to Diagnose IIS website hangs to start resolving your hangs.