I've been dealing with serious memory issues on my server. Over the weekend, I got a call about extreme lag on PCs that rely on specific software from our on-site server. After investigating, I noticed that the IIS Worker Process was consuming an alarming amount of RAM, starting at around 80MB and shooting up to over 6GB. Eventually, the machine hit 99% RAM usage, making everything nearly unusable. The main culprit appears to be W3WP.exe, which prompted me to run Microsoft Debugger to collect logs related to IIS and W3WP.exe; however, I'm not sure what I'm looking for in those logs. I disabled two IIS sites, "Default Web Site" and "QPush," and so far, there haven't been any memory issues. I'm planning to turn one back on soon to see if it triggers the problem again. Any advice on where to look or what to check for a memory leak would be greatly appreciated. No updates were installed right before this started, which adds to my confusion.
2 Answers
You might want to invest in New Relic. It's a solid option for identifying performance issues in applications and can provide detailed insights.
It's likely that the issue stems from a memory leak in the web application itself. You might want to consider limiting the memory usage for the specific application pool in IIS. This might not fix the underlying problem, but it could help manage the symptoms by keeping RAM usage under control.
I think this really helped! While it doesn’t fix the root issue, limiting the DefaultAppPool and .NET v4.5 pools to 2GB each, and the Qpush pool to 3GB, has significantly reduced the RAM usage to a more manageable level.
That’s great to hear! Keep an eye on it, and let us know if the memory issues come back.
Thanks! I’ll give that a shot tomorrow.