What possibilities can cause "Service Unavailable 503" error?

asp.net-mvc iis windows-server-2003 http-status-code-503
MemoryLeak picture MemoryLeak · Nov 11, 2010 · Viewed 124k times · Source

we have a asp.net MVC application deployed to a server, and but when there is too many request to the server, the client will just get a "503 service unavailable" error.
But if I deployed the application to another server ( lower hardware configuration ), everything worked fine, even more requests it can handle well.
My question is what possible configuration can cause the previous server to just throw out a 503 error ? (which means the requests didn't reach our application).

Answer

Rahul Soni picture Rahul Soni · Nov 11, 2010

Your web pages are served by an application pool. If you disable/stop the application pool, and anyone tries to browse the application, you will get a Service Unavailable. It can happen due to multiple reasons...

  1. Your application may have crashed [check the event viewer and see if you can find event logs in your Application/System log]

  2. Your application may be crashing very frequently. If an app pool crashes for 5 times in 5 minutes [check your application pool settings for rapid fail], your application pool is disabled by IIS and you will end up getting this message.

In either case, the issue is that your worker process is failing and you should troubleshoot it from crash perspective.

What is a Crash (technically)... in ASP.NET and what to do if it happens?

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