I have a website that is hosted on Plesk in Shared Hosting. The session keeps on timing out because the app pool recycles after 5 minutes (even though session timeout is set to 30 min). The effect of session timeout is exaggerated because current user activity is quite low and for users testing the app, the session keeps on timing out every 5 minutes.
On plesk web hosting panel, I can see the AppPool settings but they are disabled. Is there a way to change this setting?
Unfortunately no you cannot change this. I heard that you can set up your webapp to ping periodically to try and keep it alive:
https://www.godaddy.com/community/Developer-Cloud-Portal/IIS-Application-Pool-Idle-Timeout/td-p/9158
Can you prevent your ASP.NET application from shutting down?
If you can't change IIS settings, you can use an external uptime monitor service to continuously query your website with GET requests, which will also keep it alive. Most uptime monitors don't send actual requests, however the Availability feature in Application Insights does and works perfectly for this.
It's possible in Plesk for Plesk admin and customers/resellers:
Permissions to manage IIS pool settings are granted on a service plan level. Contact Plesk admin to change permissions on a service plan that your domain is assigned.
If you login to Plesk under an 'admin' user, make sure your Plesk is opened in a Service Provider view as this view allows editing Service Plans.
