Understanding the ASP.NET App Suspend feature, part of .NET 4.5.1 on Windows Server 2012 R2

Today, there are plenty of options on how to host (in other words, put into production) your ASP.NET web application. You could use Azure, you could use any of the commercial ASP.NET web hosting companies, use your own on-premises servers, and so on.

In case you are using commercial hosting companies with shared server, or you are running your own IIS installation with multiple apps on the same server, you might want to learn about a new ASP.NET feature called App Suspend.

This feature greatly improves the ability to run multiple ASP.NET web applications on a single server, by allowing the applications to suspend, instead of terminating them when a timeout occurs. Also, restoring a suspended web application is much faster than cold-starting an application, thus giving you better performance as well.

So you are running the latest OS version (Windows Server 2012 R2), then you can utilize this feature for ASP.NET 4.5.1 applications. To enable it, go to the advanced properties of your application pool, and set the value "Idle Time-out Action" to the value "Suspend". That's it!

For more details and the performance benefits of App Suspend, check out this MSDN blog post.

Hope this helps!