Restarting IIS

With IIS, you can stop and restart your computer when applications misbehave or become unavailable. Because several Internet services run in one process, Internet services shut down and restart differently from other Windows services, you should use the IIS snap-in and not the Computer Management Services snap-in to restart your Internet services. Using Reliable Restart, IIS automatically restarts when applications become defective. If you do not want IIS to restart automatically, see To disable Reliable Restart below.

To restart IIS
  1. In the IIS snap-in select the Computer icon for which you wish to restart IIS, and click Action.
  2. Click Restart IIS. The Stop/Start/Reboot dialog box appears.
  3. From the drop-down menu, select Restart Internet Services.

    4. Note  You also have the option to Start Internet Services, Stop Internet Services, or Reboot the computer. To stop Internet services, you must disable Reliable Restart.

  4. Click OK. IIS restarts the Web service on the selected computer.

Reliable Restart

Reliable Restart automatically restarts your Internet services if the Inetinfo.exe process terminates abnormally or if you use Windows Task Manager or Kill.exe to stop Internet services. Reliable Restart is enabled by default. You must disable Reliable Restart to restrict this automatic restart feature.

To disable Reliable Restart

  1. Right-click My Computer, and click Manage. The Computer Management window appears
    2. .
  2. Expand the Services and Applications tree in the left pane, and click Services. All Windows services display in the right pane.
  3. Right-click IIS Admin Service, and click Properties. The IIS Admin Service Properties dialog box appears.
  4. Click the Recovery tab, and choose Take No Action for each of the drop-down menus.
  5. Click OK.

Restarting IIS using the command-line

You can also restart IIS and disable Reliable Restart using the command prompt and Iisreset.exe. See the following command-line usage and parameters.

iisreset [computername]
 
/RESTART Stop and then restart all Internet services.
/START Start all Internet services.
/STOP Stop all Internet services.
/REBOOT Reboot the computer.
/REBOOTONERROR   Reboot the computer if an error occurs when starting, stopping, or restarting Internet services.
/NOFORCE Do not forcefully terminate Internet services if attempting to stop them gracefully fails.
/TIMEOUT:val Specify the timeout value (in seconds) to wait for a successful stop of Internet services. On expiration of this timeout the computer can be rebooted if the /REBOOTONERROR parameter is specified. The default value is 20s for restart, 60s for stop, and 0s for reboot.
/STATUS Display the status of all Internet services.
/ENABLE Enable restarting of Internet Services on the local system.
/DISABLE Disable restarting of Internet Services on the local system.

Related Topics

For information on starting and stopping individual Web and FTP sites, see Starting and Stopping Sites.

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