How to keep Report Server awake

There are few things more frustrating than running a demo of a new report for your users, telling them how fast it is, then having Report Server deliver your three-second report in thirty-three seconds because the server had to wake up first.  Until Microsoft makes the sleep setting for RS configurable to something other than twenty minutes, the best solution I have heard comes from Steve Wake of the Denver SQL Users Group.

Steve said his company runs a report every fifteen minutes to keep the server at attention.  I didn’t ask what was in the report, but I’m assuming it’s one of two things:

• The report is blank, so from a code standpoint it can’t fail, and it won’t consume any resources beyond the bare minimum.
• The report is for monitoring or auditing, and needs to be run every fifteen minutes anyway.

In either case, it’s a simple and practical solution and I couldn’t help but grin when I set it up on my server.