Keep a website alive – PowerShell style

 

Recently, We had a website that didn’t have frequent visitors, but when the visitors did come, the website would take a long time to load up the first time. This is expected behavior because IIS shuts down its worker threads.

1 approach would be to set the IdleTimeout to 0 which means the threads are never aborted (details here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771956(v=ws.10).aspx). Instead of that though I decided to try my hand at PowerShell and came up with the following script:

   1:  # List of URLS to Ping

   2:  $urls = @("Http://URL1.com", "https://URL2.com")

   3:   

   4:  #Ping all URLs in the list

   5:  foreach ($objItem in $urls) {

   6:      $req=[system.Net.HttpWebRequest]::Create($objItem);

   7:      $res = $req.getresponse();

   8:      $stat = $res.statuscode;

   9:      $res.Close();

  10:      

  11:      #Pump it out to a text file

  12:      $res | Out-File pingresults.txt -append 

  13:  }

After that I set up a simple scheduled task to execute this at 15 minute intervals during business hours and walk away. Since I can schedule this when users are likely to hit the site, I have a customized “keep awake” script that provides more flexibility.

Enjoy!