Administration: Application restart

Some of the operations you perform in Sitefinity CMS require an application restart to take affect. Depending on the specific type of operation, this can lead to heavy load upon restart execution.

The following article lists the various restart types in Sitefinity CMS, together with the operations that trigger them. The restart operations are ordered according to their performance overhead.

This operation unloads the application domain and resets the database model. You can perform full restart in one of the following ways:

• Click Administration » Modules & Services and activate or deactivate the Multisite module.
• Click Administration » Settings » User Authentication » Save changes.

Cleans application cache and reinitialize the system. This does not reset the database model. You can perform soft restart in one of the following ways:

• Click Administration » Modules & Services and activate, deactivate, install, or uninstall a module different that the Multisite module.
• Click Administration » Module Builder and install, uninstall, activate, deactivate, import, or delete a dynamic module type.
• Click Administration » Version & Licensing and update the license or activate a new one.
• Click Administration » Settings » Responsive design and add, activate, deactivate, or update settings.

This operations forces the metadata containers for each opened connection to be recreated.

You can perform database model restart by making any change in the dynamic types, dynamic fields, and custom fields.

NOTE: When a restart is triggered by the Sitefinity CMS application, a message for the restart operation is logged in the Trace.log file. You can find the Trace.log file in ~/App_Data/Sitefinity/Logs folder.
The message that Sitefinity CMS logs during a restart contains additional information about reason for the restart, the user that invoked the operation, a flag parameters of the restart method, etc.