Is there a memory limit for w3wp.exe?
Is there a max memory size for w3wp.exe? Mine is getting up to about 2.5-3G then seems to crash/reset.
Per the "GIVEN" dimensions below I setup some counters and noticed that the w3wp.exe will service http requests then reset to 0 along with the w3wp.exe process crashing (changing pids). As a result REQUESTS_QUEUED and ACTIVE_REQUESTS grow large causing delays in processing until the w3wp.exe can restart itself. It's doing this every 3-4min so more than likely due to heavy system volume during peak load. But not sure if it's a memory issue or not.
I see tons of warnings in my webserver (IIS) log:
A process serving application pool 'MyApplication' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '1732'. The data field contains the error number.
RESULT: Customers are reporting sporadic response times for http requests.
Can I increase this memory limit or reconfigure IIS to handle increased load?
GIVEN:
- System has been passed down to me so there may be gaps with IIS configuration, etc.
- Database: SQL Server 2008R2
- Web Servers: Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise SP1 (64bit, 64G RAM)
- IIS 7.5
- Using MVC4 Web API with MemoryCache aggressively with Model and Business Objects with eviction set to 2hrs
- Looked at the logs but really don't see anything significantly relevant
- One application pool...no other LOB applications running on this server
Answer
Is the application pool set to run in 32-bit mode? That can cause memory issues even if you have plenty of RAM. On a 64-bit system, the memory limit for a 32-bit process is 4 GB.