Asp.net: sometimes outofmemoryexception when many w3wp processes run - asp.net

I have an interesting problem with how Windows and .Net manage memory for Asp.Net applications that I can't explain myself. The problem is that I have a big Asp.Net application that after starts up can take about 1 GB memory according Resource Manager. We tried to test how many instances of the application we can run at the same time on a single machine with 14-16 GB memory.
First test is with an Azure Windows 2016 server with 8 vCPUs, 14 GB RAM, HDD.
After a few instances:
After 30 instances:
As you can see, private byes and working set of some instances reduced a lot. Based on what I read from how memory is managed (aka working set, physical memory, virtual memory, page files...), I can understand how the OS can take physical memory away from some idle processes for the others that are in need. So far so good.
Then we tested the same scenario with another Azure Windows 2016 server with 4 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, but this one uses SSD.
After about 20 instances, we got OutOfMemoryException:
The key difference I could see is that memory of all those w3wp processes were still high. In other words, they were not reduced as in the test above.
My question is why the behaviors were different? What prevented the second cases from saving memory to page file (my guess!) and thus caused OutOfMemoryException?

Checking pagefile setting showed us that it was stilled enabled in "System managed size" mode but somehow Windows refused to use it for the w3wp processes. We tried to change it to custom size and set it to 20 GB and everything started working again as expected. I must admit that I still don't know why Windows 2016 behaves like that when SSD is used though.

Related

Nuodb Memory and CPU usage reached high

While accessing NuoDB database from Java application, In Task manager tool getting CPU and Memory usage reached 99% almost and I tired with NUODB 2.4 ,2.5 and 2.6 versions but finally i am getting same issue.
Present my windows server hardware configurations are below.
RAM : 12 GB (3 processors ) and
Hard disk : 100 GB
Please give any suggest to come this issue.
Thanks in advance
I see from the task manager MANY "NuoDB Server" processes running
(the picture shows 7 NuoDB processes running on that server),
It might be having too many TEs or too much memory configured for NuoDB on
that single server as a potential for the problem or setting NuoDB incorrectly.
The following link can help you understand how to check your system settings.
http://doc.nuodb.com/Latest/Default.htm#Mgr-Show-Domain.htm?Highlight=--memory

Increase RAM usage for IIS server

I am running a large scale ERP system on the following server configuration. The application is developed using AngularJS and ASP.NET 4.5
Dell PowerEdge R730 (Quad Core 2.7 Ghz, 32 GB RAM, 5 x 500 GB Hard disk, RAID5 configured) Software: Host OS is VMWare ESXi 6.0 Two VMs run on VMWare ESXi .. one is Windows Server 2012 R2 with 16 GB memory allocated ... this contains IIS 8 server with my application code Another VM is also Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server 2012 and 16 GB memory allocated .... this just contains my application database.
You see, I separated the application server and database server for load balancing purposes.
My application contains a registration module where the load is expected to be very very high (around 10,000 visitors over 10 minutes)
To support this volume of requests, I have done the following in my IIS server -> increase request queue in application pool length to 5000 -> enable output caching for aspx files -> enable static and dynamic compression in IIS server -> set virtual memory limit and private memory limit of each application pool to 0 -> Increase maximum worker process of each application pool to 6
I then used gatling to run load testing on my application. I injected 500 users at once into my registration module.
However, I see that only 40% / 45% of my RAM is being used. Each worker process is using only a maximum amount of 130 MB or so.
And gatling is reporting that around 20% of my requests are getting 403 error, and more than 60% of all HTTP requests have a response time greater than 20 seconds.
A single user makes 380 HTTP requests over a span of around 3 minutes. The total data transfer of a single user is 1.5 MB. I have simulated 500 users like this.
Is there anything missing in my server tuning? I have already tuned my application code to minimize memory leaks, increase timeouts, and so on.
There is a known issue with the newest generation of PowerEdge servers that use the Broadcom Network Chip set. Apparently, the "VM" feature for the network is broken which results in horrible network latency on VMs.
Head to Dell and get the most recent firmware and Windows drivers for the Broadcom.
Head to VMWare Downloads and get the latest Broadcom Driver
As for the worker process settings, for maximum performance, you should consider running the same number of worker processes as there are NUMA nodes, so that there is 1:1 affinity between the worker processes and NUMA nodes. This can be done by setting "Maximum Worker Processes" AppPool setting to 0. In this setting, IIS determines how many NUMA nodes are available on the hardware and starts the same number of worker processes.
I guess the 1 caveat to the answer you received would be if your server isn't NUMA aware/uses symmetric processing, you won't see those IIS options under CPU, but the above poster seems to know a good bit more than I do about the machine. Sorry I don't have enough street cred to add this as a comment. As far as IIS you may also want to make sure your app pool doesn't use default recycle conditions and pick a time like midnight for recycle. If you have root level settings applied the default app pool recycling at 29 hours may also trigger garbage collection against your child pool/causing delays even in concurrent gc where it sounds like you may benefit a bit from Gcserver=true. Pretty tough to assess that though.
Has your sql server been optimized for that type of workload? If your data isn't paramount you could squeeze faster execution times with delayed durability, then assess queries that are returning too much info for async io wait types. In general there's not enough here to really assess for sql optimizations, but if not configured right (size/growth options) you could be hitting a lot of timeouts due to growth, vlf fragmentation, etc.

IIS 6 RAM Allocation on Windows Server 2003

I have my IIS 6 running my website. It is on a Windows Server 2003 which has 4GB of RAM. I run SQL intensive code after the user submits a form (math statistics stuff). This process is not threaded (should it be, especially if 2 or more users run the same thing?). But my process seems to consume only a couple of GBs of memory and the server crawls. How do I get my IIS process to use nearly all the memory?
I see on other sites that its 2GB or 3GB allocated using boot.ini. But is there another way for the process to use memory? If I make it multithreaded, will there be a process for each thread?
If there is still memory free for IIS, it does not need more. Even if you give it more memory it will perform better. It is good to see some memory is not used and can be used for other processes as IIS. If you want to make is multi threading, it depends on what you do parallel if more memory is used, and if you gain any performance.
The basic here is to start with your requirements and see what peak use you can have. Then make a performance test to see if your machine can handle that load. To be sure you can handle some more do an other test to see the peek load your machine can handle. Then you will know if you have to invest any more time.
Check you database server to see if you bottleneck is not on that machine, most developers forget optimizing and maintaining their databases.

Out of Memory Exception - ASP.NET - IIS 7

The problem is with Memory management because I keep receiving “Out of Memory exception”.
Here are the scenarios where we face the problem:
Please note:
1. The site/application is developed in ASP.Net and uploaded on a server with the following specs:
- Windows Server 2008 (R2) Standard
- Intel Xeon L5520#2.27GHz 2.27GHz
- RAM = 8GB
- System Type = 64bit
The application is event management based web application where the requirements include saving huge amount of data in Sessions etc (mentioning this in case it is relevant)
The applications/site works fine until we:
Edit a file directly on the server
Update a file from repository
Copy/Paste a file (we don’t usually edit code using this technique)
Please note, all of the above hold true ONLY when the traffic to the site is high that is,
The issue/error “Out of Memory” is not produced when the traffic/visits is low
Details of:
System Properties > Advanced > Performance Settings > Advanced tab
Total paging file size for all drives: 16362 MB
In web.config
Is there any way we can debug this problem to the core and find out a solution. Can you please provide links/help where we can further investigate this problem?
Best regards,
Farrukh
Out of Memory Exceptions are common with applications that see periodic transaction surges while keeping larger volumes of data in memory. This problem does, however, depend on your application and architecture. Below are a few pointers:
Hardware - you have Xeon 5500 (Intel Nehalem chips). These are very good at handling memory. You should be good here.
OS - Windows Server 2008 R2 - As an OS this system will handle more than enough memory for you (you are good here, see link for capabilities: Memory Limits for Windows)
Physical Memory - Did you say you have 8 GB on the server? Note you app is allowing 16 GB. There is one issue. If your app requests more memory than physically available you will see your error. But this is not your only concern ...
CLR / GC limitations - Your application has a "paging file size" of 16+ GB. This is probably your issue.
GC is the heart of your problem for you. In terms of why, it is the same reason Java and the JVM have issues whenever an application exceeds 2-4 GB. That requires a look at the actual process of GC.
You have "old generation" and "young generation" Garbage Collection processes. As you app runs the CLR tries to keep your memory space organized. These processes force all threads to pause (phase changes) when GC mark and swap processes occur. The problem here is, depending on how your code is written and the amount of memory you keep around for long periods, you can run into memory issues.
Any time you press a runtime environment to exceed the 4 GB threshold you will see exponential increases in collection times. When you hit the "stop the world" pause (the old gen GC where everything gets cleaned up) the CLR has to go through the entire heap and de-allocate memory. Based on your app, 16 GB may give you issues even with more physical memory (Windows Server 2008 R2 - Enterprise or DataCenter can support 2 TB). Even if you feed it more physical memory you may see LONG collection times when your full GC hits.
Ideally I would do the following:
Get more physical memory (you never want to come withing 600MB of your total physical memory allocated to your application to avoid out of memory errors, but your buffer does depend on your load and the application's ability to handle it ... you may want a larger safety net to be safe).
Once you have the physical memory you need run GC logs while stressing the app. This will give you an idea where you see exponential degradation in performance and what level your app can support when considering Heap size (Memory). You may want to find a way to get your 16GB page down to a smaller size. I do know with .Net 4.0 Microsoft has made some solid improvements to the GC process, including allowing a background thread to maintain GC. This should give you the ability to support larger heaps (in theory) ... but nothing beats real tests on the app. Check out this link for more info:
Garbage Collection Performance (Asp.net 4.0) - Also, as I am limited on links. Navigate to the Fundamentals page for some great explanations on new GC features of ASP.Net 4.0
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee787088.aspx#concurrent_garbage_collection)
Hope this helps!
PS - Anyone out there on lesser hardware will need to be aware of the ASP.NET use of the GC thread. If you are running something in development like a Core Duo you have to consider that 50% of your compute power will go to GC optimization. This means that Hardware (number of cores) is important to consider. If you have more than you need this process should theoretically help performance. If you are constrained on cores either get better hardware or use an older version of ASP.Net or consider turning the feature off (if possible). Second, if latency is a concern, using "hyper-threading" does have an impact on performance as well. You always get better performance on "physical" cores ... but that will not be a concern for 99.9% of the applications out there.
2 GB by default. If the application is large address space aware (linked with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE), it gets 4 GB (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx)
They're still limited to 2 GB since many application depends on the top bit of pointers to be zero.

w3wp.exe has high cpu usage on every request

I'm running a Windows 2008 server (a VPS with 1GB of RAM), with SQL Server Express and IIS 7 installed. On it I'm hosting a NopCommerce 1.7 website, with a database of around 26 000 products.
Right now I'm the only user of the website (it's in development) and I'm getting rather bad performance from it. To be more specific every time I make a request, the worker process goes to 90-100% CPU usage for a few seconds. Is it me or this is a lot for a 1 user NopCommerce website? Any ideas why this happens and what I can do to rectify it or further investigate?
PS: the worker process uses between 100MB-400MB of memory (private working set), and SQL Server with this database, around 160MB. Do you have any suggestions other then the obvious one to get more RAM? I intend to get one more GB but I fear this will not solve the cpu usage problem.
You've already stated you're going to get more RAM, but don't be surprised how much a lack of RAM can impact the CPU. If your RAM is not able to hold large objects efficiently because of lack of space (and I'd say using 40% of available RAM qualifies), then the CPU has to work harder to page things in and out of virtual memory. 90% is a little overkill for this, but with the server specs you give it's not impossible.
The most likely problem is that there is a hole in your code somewhere. My guess is that you have either an infinite loop or a direct memory leak (resources open during requests that aren't closed perhaps?). Your best bet would be to get the IIS Debug Diagnostics tool, install it and set up reports to find out what is going on directly on the server.

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