How to fix IIS website loading forever

Recently, we had a customer who was facing a problem with his IIS website loading forever. We helped him fix it by disabling idle timeout in IIS.

Let’s discuss how our Support Engineers resolved the error.

Disable idle timeout

One of the most common reasons for the website loading forever is the default idle timeout in the application pool. The operation by default shuts down the application pool after this time.

This happens when the website remains inactive for a while. Since IIS host multiple websites, the idle timeout feature helps to free up the memory. Thus it can allocate the un-used memory for other applications pool that is running in the webserver. Our Support Engineers disable the idle timeout follow these steps.

Click on Start >> Administrative Tools >> Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

Now select the application pool and right-click on the domain’s application pool. Select the edit application pool and click on Advanced Settings.

Now we set the idle time-out to 0. Setting the idle time-out to 0 will disable the limit.

Finally, for the changes to reflect, we restart the application pool.

That’s it. Now the website starts working fine.