One morning you open your site, and the page stays blank for 8-10 seconds. You panic — "did the server crash?" But the page loads, everything works fine. The next clicks open instantly.
This is cold start. When your application hasn't received a request for a while, IIS unloads it from memory and shuts it down. When the next request arrives, the .NET runtime has to boot from scratch, set up the DbContext, fill the DI container with services — that's where the few seconds of delay comes from.
It's not a big deal for a user-facing page, but it's a serious problem for a license validation API. A customer's plugin asks the API on every startup — if the API is asleep, the plugin looks frozen.
Not: aşağıdaki dakika değerleri örnek amaçlıdır — gerçek süre hosting sağlayıcısına ve panel ayarına göre değişir.
Note: the minute values below are illustrative — the actual duration depends on your hosting provider and panel settings.
The culprit is IIS's App Pool Idle Time-out setting. This duration isn't fixed — it depends on the hosting provider and panel configuration; some panels set it as short as 5 minutes, others 20 minutes or more. If an application receives no requests during this window, IIS shuts down the worker process (w3wp.exe). It reclaims the memory so other sites can use it.
On a dedicated server you could change this from IIS Manager, or even switch to "Always On" mode. But on shared hosting this option doesn't exist — your access to Application Pool settings is restricted, because the hosting company manages that pool, not you.
It's worth finding out the actual value on your own panel first (ask your hosting provider, or check the panel documentation). But in practice the question becomes: if you can't change IIS, how do you keep your application "busy" so it never sleeps?
The solution is based on a simple idea: before the idle timeout runs out, send your application a request yourself, from outside. Since the application is never idle, IIS never gets the chance to shut it down.
For this, you first need to add a lightweight "ping" endpoint to your application that requires no authentication:
[ApiController]
[Route("api/[controller]")]
public class PingController : ControllerBase
{
// AllowAnonymous — cron job giriş yapmıyor, sadece uyandırıyor
[HttpGet]
[AllowAnonymous]
public IActionResult Get()
{
// Ağır bir iş yapma — tek amacı process'i canlı tutmak
return Ok(new { status = "awake", time = DateTime.UtcNow });
}
}Once the endpoint is ready, next you need a scheduler to call it at regular intervals. In Plesk this is under Scheduled Tasks.
To trigger well before your idle timeout runs out, a task running every 3 minutes usually leaves a safe margin — but if you don't know your panel's actual timeout, it's worth finding that out first:
# Plesk Scheduled Task — cron ifadesi
# Her 3 dakikada bir, saatin her dakikasında (0, 3, 6, 9 ... 57)
0,3,6,9,12,15,18,21,24,27,30,33,36,39,42,45,48,51,54,57 * * * *
# Çalıştırılacak komut (curl ile)
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://api.emreulutabak.com/api/pingAfter setup, you need to confirm the solution is actually working. A few methods: