I use IIS 5.1 for development. Why? Well, I don’t know so much these days. It used to be because I planned to do some .NET development that never panned out. Anyhow, I use IIS.
What ticks me off about IIS is how from time to time it flakes out. When it does this all you can do is restart the service. But, approximately 229% of the time I get an error saying something akin to this:
Could not stop the IIS Admin service on local computer
Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion
Usually when this happens I’m forced to reboot.
So, today, after a little creative googling I found this link. This page describes the iisreset command! It turns out that restarting IIS when it craps out like this is as simple as opening a command prompt and typing this command:
iisreset localhost /restart
Of course, you’ll need to use the correct machine name in place of localhost.
Running this program will result in this output:
Attempting stop... Internet services successfully stopped Attempting start... Internet services successfully restarted
After it’s done (which seems to take less time than using the services control panel to restart the services) IIS will work correctly again (till the next time it goes belly up).
DougHughes.net 
Comments on: "When you can't revive a dead IIS process…" (7)
As a long-time IIS user, I would question why it is flaking out. IIS is pretty stable ordinarily and most issues are generally code or add-in related. I can’t say I recall IIS 5 or 6 hanging when it wasn’t related to code.
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Doug – I, too, have used IIS for more than 8 years and not had much of an issue with it hanging…until this last spring.
IIS was hanging at times. We kept restarting and it wasn’t until CF started to hang (and the subsequent disk crash) that we finally figured it out.
It was a disk issue. We were using a RAID 1 software controller and it was causing disk corruption. It is minimal at first, but over time, it progresses.
You can’t really find it using the Windows server disk utilities, since they are not aware of the RAID controller. But we did start seeing some “bad write” errors popping up in the windows event manager.
I suggest you scour the event logs to see if you are getting bad writes or other disk issues. Are you using RAID or any type of mirroring? Those may have utilities for checking.
IIS 6 is quite stable for us, and we have thousands of active users every hour pounding on our NaturalInsight servers without issue.
Hopefully you can discover the root of your IIS problems.
Paul
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Just to add some clarity to the post, I’m using the 5.1 that comes with XP. This is on my laptop and only for development. I suspect I need to reinstall IIS or something.
I’ve found sometimes that virus scaners can cause the same sort of problem.
All in all, the blog entry was more for posterity than anything else. That is, when you can’t shutdown IIS this may work.
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Well that helps clarify it!
And for posterity, perhaps others will move their code to a new server before they experience a disk crash!
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you can also reboot your pc using iisreset – an interesting way to reboot a shared hosting server iif you where evil. (nasty!)
iisreset.exe /reboot
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It turns out that this was a bigger issue. I’ll blog about it before long.
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Thanks for this posting. I am also facing the same problem but nothing useful info is available in event viewer.
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