Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Types of Issues

It is important to gain an understanding of the types of failures that can be encountered on your web server. IIS 8.0 has built-in support for the following types of errors:

• Specific errors
• Hang/time-out issues
• Resource-intensive issues

Specific Errors

The first type of error is a specific error. These are the errors that usually fail quickly and will show an HTTP Error page corresponding to the error (see Figure 23.1). Some errors (for example, those with a 500 HTTP status code) will have customized error pages with extensive information used for troubleshooting and debugging. Specific errors are often the easiest to troubleshoot because the error message will immediately narrow down the issue, and usually they are easy to reproduce and will fail the same way every time.

Figure 23.1

IIS 8.0 goes out of the way to give immediate and valid information that can be used to solve the specific issue. For example, consider a case in which you forget to put in a default document. The error page that IIS 8.0 serves up will tell you exactly what is happening, providing detailed error information, most likely causes, suggestions on what you can try, and links to further information.

Hang/Time-Out Issues

The second type of error is a hang or time-out error. In past versions of IIS, these were often very difficult to troubleshoot. The error would often simply say that there ...