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IIS Reset Activity

Applies To: Windows Server 2008

IISreset.exe is a command-line utility that can be used to stop, start, and restart IIS Internet services.

Note:  Restarting or stopping IIS, or rebooting your Web server, is a severe action. When you use IISreset, your Web sites and applications become unavailable, all sessions connected to your Web server are dropped, and you lose existing state in your applications. Changes to the metabase can be lost. Your Web sites and applications will be unavailable until the affected Internet services are restarted.

The IISreset command stops and restarts the IIS Admin Service, the Windows Process Activation Service (WAS), and the World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW Service).

Avoid using IISreset unless absolutely necessary. Instead, first try to restart an individual Web site or an individual application pool that may be causing problems. To do this by using IIS Manager, follow these steps:

  1. To restart an individual Web site, in the Connections pane, expand the Web site node. In the tree, click the site that you want to restart, and in the Actions pane, click Restart.
  2. To recycle an application pool, in the Connections pane, click the Application Pools node. On the Application Pools page, select the application pool that you want to recycle, and in the Actions pane, click Recycle.

To do this by using the appcmd command-line tool, follow these steps:

  1. Click Start. In the Start Search box, type "cmd" and then press ENTER.
  2. At the command prompt, type cd "%windir%\system32\inetsrv" and then press ENTER.
  3. To restart an individual Web site, type "appcmd stop site site_name" where site_name is the name of the Web site that you want to restart. Then type "appcmd start site site_name".
  4. To recycle an application pool, type "appcmd recycle apppool apppool_name" where apppool_name is the name of the application pool that you want to recycle.

If you do need to use the IISreset command, include the /noforce parameter to prevent the services from being forcefully restarted if they cannot do so gracefully, and add the /timeout parameter to specify a number of seconds to wait before the services are restarted. This may help prevent problems that can occur when processes are stopped before they have finished.

For more information about IISReset in IIS 6.0, see the article "Restarting IIS (IIS 6.0)" at (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=103388).

Events

Event ID Source Message

3201

Microsoft-Windows-IIS-IISReset

IIS start command received from user %1. The logged data is the status code.

3202

Microsoft-Windows-IIS-IISReset

IIS stop command received from user %1. The logged data is the status code.

3203

Microsoft-Windows-IIS-IISReset

IIS reboot command received from user %1. The logged data is the status code.

3204

Microsoft-Windows-IIS-IISReset

IIS kill command received from user %1. The logged data is the status code.

3205

Microsoft-Windows-IIS-IISReset

Your computer is being shut down by %1. Save any work that may be lost!

3206

Microsoft-Windows-IIS-IISReset

IIS Reset encountered an error while stopping services, which was requested by %1. The logged data is the status code. Since the force option is on, IIS Reset will now terminate the services' processes. This may cause SCM to report errors about the services exiting.

IISADMIN Service

Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0