Rails on Helicon Zoo very slow

Question

We have deployed a rails site to a Windows Server running IIS using Helicon Zoo.

After the initial request, subsequent requests are very fast. However if we leave the site for a while and come back, it is dead slow again for the initial request.

My guess is that this is related to the workers, i.e when Helicon decides it needs a new worker, that means a whole new instance of rails starting up, with it's slow start up time.

Running in WebBrick on local developer machine (in production env) the app runs very fast after initial request without these lapses. It was also the case previously when it run with Passenger on Linux (we can't run it like that anymore unfortunately). So I don't think it's anything in the code.

Is there a way to overcome this, perhaps a "constant" worker in Helicon? Or perhaps the problem is completely different?

Answer 1

Go to IIS Manager, Application Pools, open application pool that is running your web site, click on Advanced Settings in the right and increase Idle Timeout value (default 20 minutes).