title: Why Application_Start fire multiple times in Global.asax?
body: <p>I have a Silverlight application hosted in an ASP.NET page. I need to do some processing when the application first starts up and start up some background processes (various periodic checks).</p>
  
  <p>I thought that the Global.asax Application_Start event would be a good place to do this, but I find that the Application_Start fires multiple times which I didn't expect. From what I've read it seems that when the last user logs out of my application their session disappears and IIS unloads my application. When it's next requested it gets loaded again and the Application_Start runs again, which is not really what I want.</p>
  
  <p>Is this the expected behaviour? Is there any way to keep the application loaded and not have it restart like this?</p>
  
  <p>Secondly, I have these periodic background processes that I want to run. Maybe a Windows Service would be a better place for them, but having a timer run from within a static class in my application is convenient. Is there a way I can keep these running even though there are no active users?</p>