I represent a small business in Pennsylvania for whom I wrote a rather large web application for a while back. After switching to a newer Windows 2003 dedicated server with more juice at SoftLayer, the application (which uses an SQL Server express back-end) has not been running stably. When running with just 1 IIS worker process enabled before long the entire application locks up and the server doesn't seem to respond to requests (just "waits"). Right now the site is running on 15 worker processes with a very low restart time (15 minutes) since the processes seem to lock up so often. The site runs somewhat well now but still there are many times when pages time out, etc. and still a few instances a day where the whole application locks up.
Since I have little experiencing troubleshooting and diagnosing these types of server issues on Windows 2003, I am looking for an *expert* in IIS and SQL Server with perhaps a bit of ASP.NET experience to diagnose and troubleshoot the issue and do whatever it takes to resolve it - or if it for some reason ends up being an application issue, a report of what is likely causing the problem. You will probably have to use monitoring tools such as IISState and other diagnostics to diagnose the issue and monitor the server, while the site is operational, to help determine the problem.
I will not be available during the day to guide you through this; all I can do is send you some information about the ASP.NET application and server access. Since this site is production (live website), contact with the owner of the small business during the day is a must (if you need to shut it down for a time or try something that causes it to go down, etc.).
Though not necessary, it would be nice to find someone somewhat longer term to be available if issues like these come up again on a prearranged hourly rate for troubleshooting.
Once again, this sounds like a fairly deep IIS/SQL Server/ASP.NET issue to me, so please only contact me if you have experience diagnosing such issues and using diagnostics tools such as IISState and SQL Server monitoring. I am reluctant to go with larger companies offering support because many of the support personnel will not have the experience necessary to perform troubleshooting like this. I am hoping there are several independent server admins with an appetite for curious problems on this forum who might be able to help us out. The owner of the small business is not technical but is a very nice guy and will be willing to work with you; I've already instructed him how to perform tasks like restarting IIS and the whole server to restore stability (for a while at least).
If you are interested, please contact me at administrator *A T* rarenewspapers.com with a short paragraph on what you have to offer; we will pay well.
Linear Mode
