Hi all,

At my job I've been maintaining a three-portal DotNetNuke installation for a while.  I recently upgraded from 4.5.1 to 4.8.4.  The upgrade completed successfully, but ever since then, on Monday mornings when I come in to work, DotNetNuke is acting crazy.  Symptoms:

• Some, or all, modules are completely missing from certain pages
• Admin pages intermittently refuse to load and throw a variety of ASP.NET errors.  Other times they work fine.
• Sometimes the site won't load at all and throws a "Server Error in Application."

As soon as I go into Host Settings and hit the "Restart Application" link, all the problems vanish.  This suggests that there is nothing wrong with the database or the filesystem.  It seems like an ASP.NET problem. After I restart the app, the sites are fine all week as I work with them.  Then next Monday morning, it's the same thing all over again.

Until I really figure this out, I've scheduled a task on the server to update the last modified date/time on DotNetNuke's web.config file every Saturday and Sunday night, which should have the effect of restarting the application automatically.  Hopefully that will mitigate this in the interim.

Anyone have a guess on what could be the trouble?  Where should I look?

We've had issues like this and it was related to the order of how we installed the .net updates...It didn't clear up until we added the latest dotnet 3.5 update and even then the IIS misbehaves...If you check MSDN i believe there is KB on install order of the .net patches.  If I can find it again, I will post it here.

I hope this helps

Jerry

Thanks to everyone for the replies and ideas.

As far as what happens each Sunday night that might be causing the issues, that was the first thing I asked our IT manager.  We have a full server backup process that runs on Sunday.  This process was running before I installed 4.8.4 and wasn't causing any issues with the older version we were using (4.5.1).

That's an interesting note about the order of installation for the .NET patches.  Our server is only running .NET Framework v2.0.50727.  3.x is not installed.  I don't know that last time .NET was touched -- as far as installing a patch or update -- but it was probably a while ago.

Since the 4.8.4 upgrade, I also noticed occasional unhandled exceptions being reported in our Application Event Log.  Usually, these are IndexOutOfRangeExceptions, with a variable message; often PropertyDefinitionId or ProfileData.

Since hitting DNN's "Restart Application" link always clears up all of the problems on Monday, I set up a scheduled task to update the modified date and time of the web.config file every night, which in effect restarts the app.  Since doing that I have not seen any more unhandled exceptions in the app event log.  I will check in over the weekend and on Monday to see what happens.