Up to Windows 2008 there was a nifty little VB-Script called iisapp.vbs. This allowed to just restart the application pool without having to restart the whole IIS. For one this is much faster and also this doesn’t effect other application pool. Thus you can restart a single application.

But with Windows 2008 this script is no longer provided. But fortunatly there is a new kid in town: appcmd.exe. This tool can be found in c:\windows\system32\inetsrv.

To restart (recylce) an application pool you just call:

c:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd recycle apppool "SharePoint - 80"