Jarrod Dixon's questions

During our production builds, a very large (10 megabyte) static content file in the root directory will sometimes be locked by IIS and cannot be deleted by the clean task. This is presumably because it is being actively served to one or more clients at the time.

The build process stops the website before cleaning via

c:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe stop site http://oursite.com

However, this does not release the file - we have to restart IIS to get the process to relinquish its lock.

appcmd.exe allows you to take IIS down completely; we do not want to do this!

Are there any other ways to get IIS to let go of a locked file, without restarting IIS? Simply stopping and starting the individual website is definitely not working to release the file lock.

Our database currently only has one FileGroup, PRIMARY, which contains roughly 8GB of data (table rows, indexes, full-text catalog).

When is a good time to split this into secondary data files? What are some criteria that I should be aware of?

Our nightly full (and periodic differential) backups are becoming quite large, due mostly to the amount of indexes on our tables; roughly half the backup size is comprised of indexes.

We're using the Simple recovery model for our backups.

Is there any way, through using FileGroups or some other file-partitioning method, to exclude indexes from the backups?

It would be nice if this could be extended to full-text catalogs, as well.