title: Will "Always On" setting prevent BOTH idleTimeout and periodicRestart?
body: <p>Has you may know, Web sites hosted under Microsoft Azure Web Sites service are by default configure to timeout after idling 20 minutes (idleTimeout) and the application pool to restart every 29 hours (periodicRestart). This cause the web site to be slow for the first user accessing it.</p>
  
  <p><strong>I would like to know if the new "Always On" setting available on standard mode will prevent <em>both</em> situation from happening.</strong> </p>
  
  <p>I found a few articles mentioning the feature, they are all very clear that the idle timeout will be avoided but none of them explicitly talks about the periodic restart: </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>One of the other useful Web Site features that we are introducing
    today is a feature we call “Always On”.  When Always On is enabled on
    a site, Windows Azure will automatically ping your Web Site regularly
    to ensure that the Web Site is always active and in a warm/running
    state.  This is useful to ensure that a site is always responsive (and
    that the app domain or worker process has not paged out due to lack of
    external HTTP requests).</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2014/01/16/windows-azure-staging-publishing-support-for-web-sites-monitoring-improvements-hyper-v-recovery-manager-ga-and-pci-compliance.aspx">http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2014/01/16/windows-azure-staging-publishing-support-for-web-sites-monitoring-improvements-hyper-v-recovery-manager-ga-and-pci-compliance.aspx</a></p>
  
  <p>Also the Azure Documentation is not very explicit:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Always On - By default, web sites are unloaded if they have been idle
    for some period of time. This lets the system conserve resources. You
    can enable the Always On setting for a site in Standard mode if the
    site needs to be loaded all the time. Because continuous web jobs may
    not run reliably if Always On is disabled, you should enable Always On
    when you have continuous web jobs running on the site.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-configure/">http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-configure/</a></p>