IIS7: A process serving application pool 'YYYYY' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service

52
votes

We're running a 32-bit Windows server 2008 with an IIS version of 7.
We're attempting to publish an asp.net 4.0 webapp and so far our attempts have only yielded a few warnings in the serverlog without even stopping the 4.0 application pool

A process serving application pool 'ASP.NET v4.0' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '1904'. The data field contains the error number.

The application is running under a 4.0 app-pool and under the default website.
We've also got some older .asp's running flawlessly.
Even when attempting to publish a barren (read. only 1 line of text) .aspx-file it failed miserably... We've since long run out of ideas on what to do so any form of input would be appreciated...

6
asp.netiis-7windows-server-2008http-status-code-503
@ScottE Link is dead – Martijn
Updated link: mvolo.com/… – William Gross
In my case, problem was an unlimited recursive loop in my application code. – Mohsen Tavoosi محسن طاوسی
I know the post is old, but I've got to say that when I was searching for a solution to my problem, it didn't help. I must say that my problem was related to database users. They didn't have EXECUTION permissions. C-ya. – MaGnumX

6 Answers

16
votes

Make sure that each Application Pool in IIS, under Advanced Settings has Enable 32 bit Applications set to True

IIS screenshot

14
votes

I was debugging the problem for the better part of the day and when I was close to burning the building I discovered the Process Monitor tool from Sysinternals.

Set it to monitor w3wp.exe and check last events before it exits after you fire a request in the browser. Hope that helps further readers.

12
votes

Debug Diagnostics Tool (DebugDiag) can be a lifesaver. It creates and analyze IIS crash dumps. I figured out my crash in minutes once I saw the call stack. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/919789

1
votes

When I had this problem, I installed 'Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015' from MSDN. I attached my local VS to the server to debug.

I appreciate that some folks may not have the ability to either install on or access other servers, but I thought I'd throw it out there as an option.

1
votes

I ran into this recently. Our organization restricts the accounts that run application pools to a select list of servers in Active Directory. I found that I had not added one of the machines hosting the application to the "Log On To" list for the account in AD.

0
votes

For me the problem was a configuration file that was missing an Element.