Why do my azure sites keep falling?

Question

I am testing the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and host two sites with a very low level of requirements. One of them is a simple website with one form, which simply receives some data from the user, performs some calculations and spills out the output. The second is similar, but it performs a simple query on an Azure SQL Server instance.

Both websites are constantly falling. What seems to be happening is that if I haven't been on the website for a while (maybe an hour or so), the GET request just fails. Nothing is returned from the server. If I wait a minute or two and try again, the site is working fine.

Does anyone know what is happening or how can I fix this? I obviously can’t host websites on this platform if reliability is low ...

Answer 1

The Windows Azure websites used the concepts of cold (inactive) and warm (active) sites, which means that with an active Internet connection, it will be warm or active and after a certain time by default, when the site is not active, the connection will work in cold or inactive site mode. As soon as a new connection is established on the same site, the site will wake up from inactive (cold) mode to active (warm) and will depend on what content needs to be displayed on the website, it may take several seconds to complete the startup process. The concept of warm and cold sites is described here .

Technically, the first GET request will fail if it returns immediately for a cold website, however this call makes the site active and the following requests will succeed.

There was a discussion of SO in which the index page had to connect to the database to receive data, and because the connection time to the database was longer, which led to the fact that the total start time was longer than expected. Thus, there may be several reasons when the transition from cold to warm can be longer, and you can contact the Windows Azure Websites team to check why the case exists.