Wednesday, May 24, 2017

IIS Application Pool errors causing SharePoint 2010 to crash

We've just spent the last 7 hours troubleshooting a SharePoint 2010 issue, so I have been inspired to blog our experience in the hope we can save someone else that finds themselves in the same situation.

This problem came up on a SharePoint 2010 farm on a Windows 2008 R2 server. After applying Windows Updates, the SharePoint website stopped working. We had errors in the System and Application Windows Event logs:


  • A process serving application pool 'Intranet App Pool' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '10280'. The data field contains the error number.
  • .NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.8669 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (000007FEF90F0D3E) (80131506)


Here is the post that led us to a solution:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/momteam/2017/03/21/apm-feature-in-scom-2016-agent-may-cause-a-crash-for-the-iis-application-pool-running-under-net-2-0-runtime/

In our case, the application was called Microsoft Operations Management Agent. Once we uninstalled this, our problem disappeared. We have yet to try the work-arounds for reinstalling the agent. Right now, we are just enjoying having our website back online.

It seems like you need to have a very specific set of updates for this issue to happen. Another one of our production servers is running version 2.0.50727.5420 of the dot net framework with the same agent, but hasn't run into the same issues. 

One thing that we discovered through this process is that our test environment doesn't have the agent installed. We will probably install the agent so that we can discover these issues in our test environment instead of our production environment in future.

The irony of a health monitoring agent bringing down our production environment is not lost on me. Please leave a comment if this post helps fix your issue.

Update: a great blog post about this issue: http://kevingreeneitblog.blogspot.com.au/2017/03/scom-2016-agent-crashing-legacy-iis.html
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