Yes, I know. You're now thinking the same thing I was when we found out about that: "ASP.net? why in the *HECK* does a *BACKUP* program require a server-side *HTML*-generating language?" But it does -- or more specifically, it requires one of its directories.
Something stupid in one of the BE services decides that it needs to call the ASP.net compiler, which writes the results of this compilation into the "Temporary ASP.Net Files" subdirectory under the framework install path. If this subdirectory doesn't exist, then the compilation will fail. And the service will helpfully retry the compilation almost immediately -- and of course it'll again fail. So the service helpfully retries almost immediately -- and it fails.
Etc., etc., ad nauseam. This completely hosed up our server one night (shortly after the upgrade to either v10, or v11d, can't remember which). And since each compilation leaks some memory (or at least, doesn't free it), the server was paging like *MAD* the next morning. (It had 1GB of RAM, and the page file was 4GB by the time we got in and noticed it wasn't working right. Shutting down took *three hours* due to all the paging.)
Once it came back up, we noticed the BE service went nuts again, so we ran filemon; it showed lots of accesses to the "temporary asp.net files" path. Creating that directory manually caused the service to start working again. (Of course it didn't free the memory it had leaked again in the time it was failing, but restarting the service one more time fixed that.)
And for reference: the path wasn't there because IIS wasn't installed on that box (and it never will be, either!) when the .net framework was installed. So the framework never created the directory, since it figured it'd have plenty of time to do that when aspnet_regiis was run later (if IIS did get installed). As far as I know, the compilation stuff that BE was using wasn't ever meant to be used by anyone other than the ASP.net code itself (why am I not surprised that they tried that?).
Now, maybe this has all been fixed since then; that may have been an older version of BE, I'm not sure. But still -- if they pull crap like that once, what are they doing now? (And I don't know if your issue is the same, either. But who knows.) |
