When should the Azure site resume and what are the implications?

Question

On the Azure Management Portal, you can customize your website. As an example, you can change the version of PHP used by your site. When you have edited the configuration option, you need to click "Save."

So far so good. But you also have the option to restart your site (by clicking "Restart" next to "Save").

My question is: when should you restart your site? Are there any configuration changes that require a reboot, while others do not? I did not find any hints in the user interface.

Are there other situations requiring a reboot? Say the website runs for a given time without a reboot?

Also, what are the consequences of restarting a website? Does this affect cookies / sessions in any way (e.g. delete a user’s trash or log out)? Are there any other consequences that I should be aware of?

Answer 1

Generally speaking, you can restart your site due to application performance issues. For example, you may have a memory leak in the application, closing connections, or other things that will degrade application performance over time. When you control your site and observe similar conditions, you can decide to reload it. Even better, you can even automate the restart task when these conditions occur. In any case, such things are not unique to Azure Websites. You would take similar steps for a site site.

As for configuration changes, if you make changes to your web.config file, this change will be detected and your site will automatically restart for you. Similarly, if you make configuration changes on the CONFIG page of your website on the Azure management portal, such as application settings, connection strings, etc., then the Azure websites will detect this change in your environment and automatically restart it.

Indeed, restarting the website will cause the session data stored in memory to be lost for this instance. In addition, if you have a startup / initialization code that takes time to complete, then this will need to be repeated. Again, this is not something unique to Azure Websites.