Remove a orphan application pool ( web application )

Question

I got a problem with an orphan application pool where a old web application used to reside.

Deleting the web application successfully removed the IIS site, content database and got completely removed from SharePoint. I thought. It's still alive on 2 of 3 servers.

Initially i thought that i could get rid of the application pool by creating a new web application and associate it with the app pool by choosing it from existing application pools - it does now show up.

Then i found this older thread with a suggestion to remove it using PowerShell:

$applicationPools = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService.ApplicationPools

$applicationPools.Remove("GUID")

Same as above, the application pool does not show up. To me it looks like all the relationships with SharePoint is already removed and the application pool is just a leftover in the IIS and i should be able to remove it directly from there on both servers that still has it.

Anyone else that had this problem? Is there any manual timer job that i could trigger to remove it?

Answer 1

Once you removed the Web application, it should remove the APP as well from the IIS if that app pool is not being shared with other web applications.

As you said, that this app does not listed in the SharePoint( when checking from exisitng app Pool), thats mean it is gone from sharepoint but for some reason it is still exsit on the couple of server.

I would do the following things:

• try to reset IIS on those server then refresh the IIS manager console and check if app pool is still their.
• if still their then I will manually delete it from IIS manager. It will not hurt as it is not being used in the SharePoint.