I'm running a very high traffic site that gets a good 300+ requests/second (http://cooltext.com). A restart takes a good 90 seconds at least for it. So every time I post a new build it goes down for a minute or two. Long enough to trigger my monitoring services.
When I make a change that restarts the server, it appears that the restart stalls until all of the old requests on the old application pool (some of them very long running) complete. I can make the restart happen much faster by killing the old w3wp.exe instance manually.
Is there some way to force IIS to close all the connections right away and do a hard restart? Some setting in IIS or asp.net to control this?