What possibilities can cause “Service Unavailable 503” error?-Collection of common programming errors

Primarily what that means is that there are too many concurrent requests and further that they exceed the default 1000 queued requests. That is there are 1000 or more queued requests to your website.

This could happen (assuming there are no faults in your app) if there are long running tasks and as a result the Request queue is backed up.

Depending on how the application pool has been set up you may see this kind of thing. Typically, the app pool’s Process Model has an item called Maximum Worker Processes. By default this is 1. If you set it to more than 1 (typically up to a max of the number of cores on the hardware) you may not see this happen.

Just to note that unless the site is extremely busy you should not see this. If you do, it’s really pointing to long running tasks