Multiple w3wp.exe worker processes per application pool, without web garden

[war...@gmail.com]

Does anyone know what might cause Windows Server 2008 R2 to continually create w3wp.exe processes for an application pool?

-It's set to recycle every 27 hours, with overlapping, but these processes sometimes start multiplying within an hour. I've seen it get to 50+ instances before the server runs out of memory and locks up.

-I have the app pool set to "Maximum Worker Processes = 1". So this is not a web garden!

-Running "appcmd list wp" only shows 1 active process for each app pool.

-This is a very basic IIS web and db server. The only other installed software is MailBee, NetDrive, and CrashPlan... all of which have not caused problems for years.


Any ideas? Your help is greatly appreciated!

[Brian Cryer]

<war...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:846c064c-94c1-4d9f...@googlegroups.com...

What are the recycle conditions on the application pool? And is your
application writing to files in the wwwroot?

I'm wondering whether something is causing it to recycle - which would
explain why you get so many in an hour, but that the "old" worker process is
busy doing something which is why it/they don't end.

DON'T DO THIS IN PRODUCTION, but my guess would be that if you set "Disable
Overlapped Recycle" to True then you wouldn't have the problem of multiple
worker processes but that you would find that your application locks up. No
multiple worker processes because I think your application is trying to
recycle and with this setting (I think) it won't start another worker until
the previous one has finished. I'd expect it to lock up because I think
there is a reason why the old workers won't recycle. If I am right then you
need to concentrate on finding out what your appliation is doing and why it
isn't recycling.

This is a best guess ... could be off target, but I hope it helps.

BTW: Microsoft have mostly abandoned their newsgroups, prefering to use
their online forum. Shame, but that explains why this newsgroup isn't very
active any more.
--
Brian Cryer
http://www.cryer.co.uk/brian

[war...@gmail.com]

Thank you for the reply and information about the group.

The app itself does write to folders in wwwroot (uploading images and pdfs, for example). Interesting theory... perhaps I'll give that a shot.

I do believe I narrowed it down to NetDrive causing this issue... so I may just find an alternative for that. But you may still be right about NetDrive causing the worker process to hang.

Thanks again!

[Brian Cryer]

<war...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:5559e4a4-4dfb-4aad...@googlegroups.com...

> Thank you for the reply and information about the group.
>
> The app itself does write to folders in wwwroot (uploading images and
> pdfs, for example). Interesting theory... perhaps I'll give that a shot.

If the application writes to folders in the wwwroot then this will cause the
application to recycle. I don't think you can configure this in the
application pool settings ... but if its a .net application (which I assume
it is) then look into waitChangeNotication and maxWaitChangeNotification.

This discussion might also be interesting (it applies to more than just the
web.config file):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/613824/how-to-prevent-an-asp-net-application-restarting-when-the-web-config-is-modified