HTTP 500 Internal Server Errors: Understanding and Log Collection for Effective Analysis
The HTTP 500 Internal Server Error is one of the most common errors faced by developers and administrators when hosting web applications in IIS. This error indicates that the server encountered an issue preventing it completing the request, but it doesn’t provide much detail on what went wrong. To effectively troubleshoot the problem understanding of 500 status code and detailed log collection are essential. In this article, we’ll explore the 500 Internal Server Error, why it happens, and the various methods for collecting useful diagnostic logs.
ASP.NET ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider and port 445 (SMB)
While AD Membership is no longer recommended for use (use ADFS or something more modern instead), and is no longer being actively developed, we still see it from time-to-time here in support. One issue when using System.Web.Security.ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider I've personally seen a couple times is the provider failing when port 445 is either inaccessible or blocked. When setting-up this provider with Active Directory, port 445 between the app server and Domain Controllers must be open and usable.Troubleshooting Performance Problems related to Application Domains reloading
Throughout my time working on the IIS team I've seen a lot of cases where frequent unloading of the Application Domains caused several performance issues. While there are a lot of blog post covering the mechanism ASP.NET uses to detect changes in the files, each of them only covers one aspect of the problem. Hopefully this article can provide a more unified perspective and help you understand how you can troubleshoot or prevent these issues.
