title: Should I set ASP.NET application pool to auto-recycle?
body: <p>I have a number of ASP.NET (4.0) web applications that appear to leak (a small amount) of memory during each request. It is such a small amount, that for most use-cases, it will not grow to become a problem for weeks or even months at a time. I generally try to be good with closing any connections managed by the application, avoiding state-variables (or instance variables for my singleton), etc.  </p>
  
  <p>My question is this -  is this normal behavior for ASP.NET applications? I had turned off the default (IIS 7) behavior of recycling the app pool after 20 minutes of being idle. I do this since the application takes a few minutes to build its internal cache, and I want to avoid negatively impacting the user experience (and having them wait for the application to start when they issue the request).</p>
  
  <p>I am aware this could be mitigated by serializing the cache or speeding up the cache generation process but my question has more to do with the principle of it: I personally consider relying on the IIS auto-recycle feature as a bandaid approach. Am I wrong? am I just not seeing the garbage collector at work because the application's memory usage is not high enough compared to the amount of available memory? or should I dig deeper into the memory issues?</p>
  
  <p>Any insight would be appreciated.</p>