We produce a COM+ application for which we typically deploy it with multiple application pools for better load handling and scalability. For our application, there's quite a heavy cost to process start-up/initialisation. The problem is, in some environments the processes will only start on demand, and when recycling, don't always get replaced. If we manually start the COM+ application, all processes are created. If the server restarts, unless we setup a scheduled task or similar, processes only get created on demand. Ideally, whether a process was started manually or on demand, we would want it to run, and be replaced through application recycling always. In this way, we want the configured number of application pools to be constant, and represent the minimum number of processes available, to then be ready to handle sudden surges in requests.
I can't put my finger on why in some environments this seems to be case, yet in others the number of running processes falls away when idle. In most examples, we have the pooling set to 10, and 'Leave running when idle' enabled in Advanced settings. The processes run under a named and dedicated "This user: " account, which is a local admin user. We also make use of Object Pooling, which means newly started or recycled processes are better initialised, and respond more quickly when first used.
