Can't start site in IIS (use by another process)

Question

When I try to start a site in IIS it says:

the process can\'t access the file because it used by another process

I searched in Goog

Answer 1

Check using netstat -aon or netstat -aon | findstr 0.0:80 in a command prompt to see which Process Id is LISTENING to port :80 and then watch for that Process Id (PID) in Task Manager with view->select columns-> process id checked. End that process, restart IIS and you are done. (Note: if you have Skype installed, try exiting that process first.)

In a modern Task Manager, you need to go on the Details tab to search for the PID. Or, as mentioned by @Nikita G in the comments, you can use this command to find the task from your command prompt:

tasklist /FI "PID eq 123"

Note: change 123 with the PID returned from the first command.

Answer 2

In order to get more meaningful information, one way is to also get ownership information when issuing netstat so that you know the process which is using either 80 (default http binding) or 443 (if https binding is defined):

 netstat -ab

In my case the culprit was vmware:

TCP 0.0.0.0:443 ComputerName:0 LISTENING
[vmware-hostd.exe]

netstat can be piped into find to search for ports 80 or 443 (e.g. find ":443"), but these particular active connection will show at the beginning of the list at they are easy to see.

Answer 3

Most times when this happens by web developers is the reason apache, so if you go to the config file from apache! open it up and search with ctrl + f to 80 and change the ip you will see to 8080 and the sentence beneath there with 80 to 8080 and you need to confige that in you xampp, or the program u are using currently

Hope I'll help u guys out

Answer 4

Sign out of Skype and try again. I have experienced the same issue and I just logged out of Skype and then reset my IIS. It worked for me.

Answer 5

As others have said, something else may be using port 80 or 443. It was VMWare Workstation Server for me, but check other answers for how to use netstat.

Answer 6

I think this link gives a pretty good explanation and fix of this problem http://support.microsoft.com/KB/890015

Most of the time; it's caused by one of the two reasons: 1) port 80 is being used by something else and as suggested by others you can use netstat -o -n -a |findstr 0.0:80 to see whether this is the case. If yes then kill the process from task manager (tick show processes from all users)

2) if port 80 is not used, the second cause is potentially an invalid ip address in the ListenOnlyList filed in the registry key of HTTP->Parameters. If you follow the link to set the key manually or in fact you can use (xp and server 2003) httpcfg delete iplisten -i ipaddress to delete the invalid ip address. You must restart the http once you edit the ipaddress!