How to disable the application pool idle time-out in IIS7?

Question

Will it be disabled if I set the idle time-out to 0?

Answer 1

Yes, setting the idle timeout value to zero will disable idle timeouts.

Oddly this isn't documented in the MS docs but my evidence for this arises from:

• IIS Settings Schema

  If you have a look at the IIS settings schema in:

  C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\schema\IIS_schema.xml

  The schema definition for idleTimeout under

  <sectionSchema name="system.applicationHost/applicationPools">

  it looks like:

  <attribute name="idleTimeout" 
         type="timeSpan" 
         defaultValue="00:20:00" 
         validationType="timeSpanRange" 
         validationParameter="0,2592000,60"/>
  

  If you look at the validationParameter attribute we see a range of 0 to 2592000 seconds (the ,60 specifies the granularity of the setting, in this case the value must be divisable by 60 [one minute]).

  If you see a starting permissible value of 0 then that usually indicates the setting can be disabled.

• IIS7 Application Pool Idle Time-out Settings

  Brad Kingsley is the founder and CEO of OrcsWeb who are a fairly well known, respected and trusted Microsoft hoster and Gold Partner.

• Then there's also the empirical evidence of the fact that it "just works".