>On active Web sites, such as this one and some I built for clients, the site is always responding immediately as there is always something hitting the server. But, on development server, on all those I have been working with so far, I see that IIS goes down if no more hit is arriving. So, basically, it takes longer to start again on the next hit, if no hit has been hitting the server for several minutes. HTTP Keep Alive is checked. But, I have the situation. So, I am trying to figure out where is that setting that will make IIS always respond fast even if no hit has been happening in the last hour?

If you have an hour of idle time IIS will get released from memory. The default is 20 minutes. You can change that value in the Application Pool settings of IIS.

Once loaded - regardless of length of time assuming it doesn't go beyond the application pool timeout, IIS is up and running and should respond fairly quickly. However, if your machine is memory strapped IIS may end up swapping to virtual memory if it's idle and that too can be slow - in fact slower than starting up the Application Pool again.

if this is your dev box there's no reason to worry about this. If you have this problem you probably working on too low horsepower of a box. Even with an application pool startup even on my fairly old Core Duo laptop startup time from a cold start is no more than 10 seconds. Subsequent app pool restarts are more like 3-5 seconds on largish apps. If your's is taking significantly longer it's either your startup process that's slow (Application_Init code?) or your machine is really slow...

+++ Rick ---