IIS: changing site's home directory while site is running
- by Jeff Stewart
I'm trying to understand exactly what IIS 6.0 (on Windows Server 2003) does when I change the "Local Path" of a web site's Home Directory while the site is running. (Specifically with regard to ASP.NET applications.)
I'm trying to build support for or against this practice in a deployment scenario: e.g. deploy the new code alongside the old code, then simply switch the IIS web site's local path to the folder containing the new code.
IIS seems to handle this gracefully, but I notice that w3wp.exe still keeps some handles on the old code folder after the change. That's strange to me, because I would have expected IIS to recycle the application pool if this happened.
Is this safe? Is the behavior well-defined?