WordPress and AppPool Recycling

Hello!

I have several wordpress sites on a shared server and they often get up to some fairly sizeable apppool memory usage which is totally 100% ok and expected for a site getting a lot of traffic. Sometimes, however, the site isn’t so much getting a lot of traffic as its just traffic creating a lot of objects in memory and they seem to hang around for a long time. I’ve also had a couple of instances where something goofed in the worker process and the site template vanished on inside pages. The solution was to recycle the app pool but that only happened when someone reported the site looked horrendous. I’d rather refresh it periodically to know that even an unreported issue will be cleared up within a day or so max.

I can recycle app pools on some trigger like a regular time, but the next visitor will get the “initializing” page for a couple minutes. I can throw a monitor on the site so it gets woken up within a few minutes but I was curious if there is a recommendation on handling this issue. I don’t think there is a way to keep the site initialized when a worker process is swapped out but does anyone have a method they use to handle keeping memory.

If anyone has experimented with shortening the initialization time or better management of the worker process the site is in I’d love to hear.

And before I get a lot of replies that this is an IIS question, this isn’t about IIS, app pools or worker processes themselves, its about keeping the site alive as much and as quickly as possible after a start. This technically could be a server reboot as well. I’m just curious if the best solution is keeping a query on the site from an external source or if there is a better way to do this.