Recycle Application Pool not IIS

So many things in SharePoint require us to recycle the W3WP.EXE process running SharePoint in order for certain changes to be picked up. So many people think this means recycling IIS by typing IISRESET. But it takes so long for IIS to recycle!

Did you know, you don't have to recycle IIS most of the time, just the application pool our site is running within? Yes, for development purposes, we can run all SharePoint sites off the same app pool. We know, not the most secure, but each app pool consumes roughly 100MB of memory so why have a ton of them floating around in a virtual machine when memory is precious!

Instead of recycling IIS, we can create a shortcut that we can add to Quick Launch that recycles the app pool all sites run under. To do this, create a new shortcut on your desktop and enter the following target: %windir%\system32\cscript.exe c:\windows\system32\iisapp.vbs /a "[Name of your App Pool]" /r

Then drag the shortcut onto your Quick Launch toolbar. Click it and watch how fast an app pool is recycled compared to IIS!