Adjusting the site keep-alive service

The site keep-alive service is initiated at regular intervals by the publishing service associated with an iMIS site. The keep-alive service automatically "pre-loads" all your iMIS sites in IIS if IIS is restarted for any reason. Without this keep-alive service, the first browser to request a URL from any of the iMIS sites after an IIS restart would experience a long initial load time.

You can adjust the default settings of the site keep-alive service by editing the following keys in the <appSettings> element in the configuration file PublishService.exe.config, which is located in the bin folder beneath the root of the physical path for the IIS application or IIS web site that hosts iMIS sites.

■    The value of the following key should be true to enable the keep-alive pings from the publishing service, or set to false to disable the keep-alive pings.

<add key="EnableSiteService" value="true" />

■    The value of the following key should be the interval, in minutes, at which you want the keep-alive control to be pinged by the publishing service:

<add key="PingInterval" value="15"/>

■    The value of the following key should be empty if the keep-alive processing for this publishing service should affect only the IIS application or IIS web site for which this publishing service was originally installed.

<add key="AdditionalUrls" value=""/>

However, you might prefer to consolidate the keep-alive processing for all of your iMIS sites (and even the various views of iMIS) onto one specific publishing service in your production environment to centralize your keep-alive configuration and logging. To do this, you would instead specify a comma-delimited list of the absolute URLs that resolve to the IIS applications and IIS web sites that host the iMIS sites that you want to be pinged by this publishing service. For example, the following value would ping the following additional IIS applications as well as the one for which this publishing service was installed: the iMIS application  on your production iMIS server, and an iMIS site on an external web server.

<add key="AdditionalUrls" value="http://server1/iMIS,http://server3/WCMsite1"/>

Troubleshooting

■    You must have administrative access to the entire file system on your iMIS application server and on all the external web servers that you use for hosting iMIS sites.