toggling URL Rewrite Rules on IIS7 causes CLR to crash

Question

Scenario: Many users (between 10 & 100) are browsing the site, and as they browse, URL Rewrite / Redirect rules are being toggled. The application crashes at random times with the following message logged in the exception log table (we use Enterprise Library Exception framework):

Common Language Runtime detected an invalid program

Details:

An exception of type 'System.InvalidProgramException' occurred and was caught.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------  07/12/2011 12:02:20  Type : System.InvalidProgramException, mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089  Message : Common Language Runtime detected an invalid program.  Source : App_Web_wvjyf0pr  Help link :   Data : System.Collections.ListDictionaryInternal  TargetSite : System.Web.UI.WebControls.Panel __BuildControlpnlSearchResult()  Stack Trace :    at ASP.my_underscore_seperated_page_name_aspx.function() at ...

Server: Windows 2008R2

.Net: 3.5

WebServer: IIS7

Oddly, on enabling failed request tracing on IIS to capture status codes 400 - 506, no requests/responses were captured.

I understand every time a rule is toggled, Web.config is modified. Can modifiying Web.config too frequently be a cause?

Rules in Web.Config look like the follows:

<rule name="Redirect Rule For Page Name" enabled="false" stopProcessing="true">
  <match url="PageName" />
  <conditions>
    <add input="SiteFolder/SubFolder/PageName.aspx" pattern="^(SiteFolder/)([^.])+(PageName.aspx)$" />
  </conditions>
  <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.MySite/SiteFolder/NewPage.aspx" appendQueryString="false" />
</rule>

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Pretty sure that every time a web.config file is touched, the AppDomain for it is restarted.

It's plausible to me that you could be getting requests picked up by an AppDomain that's shortly thereafter aborted and the app cleaned up.

Cue Scott:

http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2006/02/21/ASP.NET-v2.0-_2D00_-AppDomain-recycles_2C00_-more-common-than-before.aspx