I maintain a Sitefinity 5 site that is fairly heavily customized, which I think plays a part in my problem, that takes upwards of 10-20+ minutes to become usable again after an app pool recycle is initiated. Sometimes I'll even have to kill the w3wp process for that specific app pool.

I'm wondering if there isn't a setting somewhere on the site/app pool that is causing problems.

So, I decided to create a new site, same codebase (different folder) with a non-routing hostname so only I can hit it, and it loads/recycles relatively quickly (1 - 2 minutes).

Does amount of traffic play into how quickly an app pool recycles?

Any other ideas?