Body: It’s an age old problem, our SharePoint app pools recycle every night, or they get cranky. But because they recycle every night the first person to hit SharePoint each morning has to wait for the app pools to warm back up, which makes them cranky. All that crankiness makes me cranky. Over the years a variety of startup scripts have been written to address this, and they all work to varying degrees. SharePoint 2013 requires PowerShell v3, and it comes with a bunch of new cmdlets. One of them jumped out at me, Invoke-WebRequest . This cmdlet can be used to download files from web sites, like WGET or CURL . The beauty of Invoke-WebRequest is that it’s built in to every SharePoint 2013 server. While it was built to download files, it can also be used to make general web requests, like to SharePoint sites. You know, to warm up their app pools. Since it’s PowerShell, it scripts like a dream. The following script will request the default page of the root site collection of each web application...