W3WP memory and threads utilization every day at midnight - asp.net

i have ASP.NET application (Microsoft "Stock Trader 5.0") installed on IIS 7.5 (Win 2008 R2) and i'm using in load application to load stress on the ASP.NET application.
every morning when i check the "perfmon" counters i see that around midnight (12 AM) i got memory and threads utilization problem (thread count jump from 150 to 1400, private memory increased in 200 MB for a few minutes).
this issue happened every day only at midnight, i tried to disabled the IIS logging, stop any schedule task that running around midnight, but i still got this issue.
there is something else that i can try or check to solve this issue ?
thanks !!

Try having a look at the access log files in: C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles
They might show any spikes in the number of requests that would explain the increase in thread count and memory usage.
You could also use profiling tools like New Relic that will give you a "CT scan" view of your application.

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ASP.Net Core Performance on Azure vs Local

I have a website with a function that generates a report in Excel that is pretty much just a datadump, approx 16000 rows, using EPPlus. This report keeps timing out for the users on Azure. The timeout (524) is a cloudflare limit if the request takes longer than 100 seconds.
I have optimised the hell out of it using Hashsets and Dictionaries, and it now runs in under 2 seconds on my laptop in Debug. I've also tried publishing with the target runtime as win-x64, in case it's a memory allocation issue.
Initially I thought the bottleneck would be memory. After setting up Application Insights, I can see that the CPU is at 100% while the memory is fairly low, about 300MB. I've bumped the Service Plan up to the P3V2 (14GB RAM & 840 ACU) to test if it's just a resource allocation issue. Even at that level, it takes about 50-60 seconds to produce. I can't run the app at that level, so I need to get it down much lower.
I'm not sure how else to optimise this, or identify the bottleneck. Any ideas?

How to get fast ASP.Net application shutdown for restart/recycle on high traffic site?

I'm running a very high traffic site that gets a good 300+ requests/second (http://cooltext.com). A restart takes a good 90 seconds at least for it. So every time I post a new build it goes down for a minute or two. Long enough to trigger my monitoring services.
When I make a change that restarts the server, it appears that the restart stalls until all of the old requests on the old application pool (some of them very long running) complete. I can make the restart happen much faster by killing the old w3wp.exe instance manually.
Is there some way to force IIS to close all the connections right away and do a hard restart? Some setting in IIS or asp.net to control this?
Just found the following that appears to be what I'm looking for: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa720127(v=vs.71).aspx
Shutdown Time Limit is the equivalent application pool setting for the shutDownTimeout ASP.NET process model setting. It specifies the amount of time a worker process is given to shutdown gracefully. If the worker process does not shutdown in time amount specified, the ASP.NET ISAPI will end the worker process. Shutdown Time Limit is set to 90 seconds by default. You can specify a different time limit by changing the value in the spin box.

Server random downtime windows server 2003 sp2 .net4

Server Specks
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP2
IIS 6
.net4
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU
X5680 # 3.33GHz, 2.00GB of RAM
Physical Address Extension
I am having trouble finding the cause of our server's random downtime. Our clients inform us that their website goes down for hours at a time. Sometimes users are able to log in however the site is extremely slow/unstable and unusable. Sometimes users are not able to log in at all. When users are able to log in not all images are displayed (they get the image not found image).
We upgraded their website from .net1 to .net4 because we thought the cause of their downtime and random user log out was due to them running their website on .net1. The website was running fine with no issues for a few months.
The first time the server started to go down after that was due to the drive with which the website resided on running out of disk space. There was 40GB partitioned to this drive and 20GB was added. This didn't resolve the issue for very long.
The second time the server would randomly go down, I noticed in the Event viewer, that the web worker associated with the app pool used by the website would periodically require to be recylcled. That is, in the Security tab of the Event Viewer I would periodically see an event with ID 1074 reading 'A worker process with process id of '1540' serving application pool 'Net4' has requested a recycle because the worker process reached its allowed processing time limit.'. I then went into this app pool's properties and saw that the app pool would be recycled every 29 hours, which is the default. I modified this to have the app pool recycle every day at 3:00am. Since that we have not seen this event in the Event Viewer. We were able to catch the website during one of its downtimes before this was changed and recycled the app pool manually. This resolved the issue in this one instance.
This did not permanently fix the issue however, as we are still receiving emails from our client informing us that the website is down for hours at a time.
I then set up a performance monitor counter log. We have managed to monitor the server's performance during many of these downtimes. It does not appear to be a problem with memory as there is plenty of space on the drive. It does not appear to be a memory leak or related to excessive paging as there are no running processes which take up an excessive amount of % Processor Time and the Pages/Second Memory counter does not peak at an excessive amount during most of the downtime (I'll explain why excessive paging occurs later). The total IO Data Bytes/sec and IO Other Data Bytes/sec Process counter does not appear to be usually high or low during downtime. The total Thread Count and Handle Count Process counter do not exhibit any abnormal spikes or drops during this time. The total thread count, at a given time, seems to be between 600 and 900, give or take. The total handle count, at a given time, seems to be between 15,000 and 23,00, give or take. The % Time in Jit .NET CLR jit counter for instance w3wp is 0 for about half of the time and will randomly peak at almost 100 the other half, most of the time peaking for just a moment but rarely peaking for about 10 minutes, unrelated to downtime.
There are random times throughout the day where the process dsmcsvc takes up most, if not all, of the % Processor Time. This is a process run by the Symantec Antivirus software. When this process takes up the % Processor Time there is a corresponding event in the Event Viewer signifying that a new virus definition file has been uploaded that is, an Application event with ID 7 'New virus definition file loaded. Version: #version number#'. When this event occurs, the Pages/Sec counter spikes. Sometimes it spikes to only 200-300 but will at times peak over 10,000. This event seems to be completely unrelated to website downtime. I have researched the Symantec Antivirus software and found that there is a known memory leak in old versions of this software. I have found that this software is known to cause high memory usage when the link to a process called NavLogon.exe is broken/does not exist. This process does not appear to exist on the server so I currently have no way of restoring the link to it. I also found that this software uses Crypt32.dll and that old versions of Crypt32.dll have a known memory leak. The Crypt32.dll which exists on the server was last updated in 2007.
The Performance Monitor log monitors the total Sessions Active ASP.Net Applications counter. During downtime, the total number of sessions does not exhibit any abnormal behavior, there are a normal amount of active sessions during this time. Active sessions at a given time can be between 0 and 200. I was informed that the time when the most users are active is during 1st shift, however during about 10pm and 2am every day, this number peaks.
The site runs JavaScript client side, and Visual Basic.net server side. All users have about 10-15 session variables almost all of the time.
When the site goes down there are no events which seem to correspond to its downtime in the Event Viewer.
I also have set up a W3C Extended Log File Format log for this site. During downtime there seems be an excessive amount of GET requests for a Telerik.RadUploadProgressHandler.ashx.
I have seriously run out of ideas at this point and have extensively searched the web for solutions and come up empty. Any feedback as to why this may be occurring would be great.
It does not appear to be a problem with memory as there is plenty of space on the drive.
Really? Memory and hard drive space are two completely different things. 2GB of RAM was okay a decade ago, when that server was new, but today it's laughably small.
But don't bother upgrading or adding RAM. This server is old enough, the problem is probably just that the hardware is reaching the end of it's useful life. Additionally, the operating system is also nearing it's end of life. Server 2003 is scheduled for end of life on July 14, 2015. After that date, there will be no new patches of any kind produced for Server 2003... not even critical security patches. That will make Server 2003 completely unsuitable as a web server.
This seems like a good time to execute a transition to a completely new server.

web app slow performance when leave idle for some time

We have a web application deployed on IIS 7.5 target framework 4.0
the application perform slow when leave idle for few minutes for first time and then perform as expected this happened each time application is idle.
With the help of fiddler I found its TCP/IP connection which is taking time about 21 secs whilein subsequent calls this time is 0.
The Idle time out is also set high and connection time out is also high in the IIS settings.
server is - Windows 2008 R2.
there is nothing in the event viewer related to the website.
we used form authentication but the time out for that is also set about 10 hours in the config file.
Can anybody point me to the setting with is affecting the response time after the app is idle for some time.
Note - this was working proper when deployed withing the LAN but this problem starts when deployed out of the LAN or in separate domain.
Problem
here is the problem in IIS app pool idle time out, its by default set to 20 minutes, after 20 minutes app pool shutdown if no request within 20 minutes,
when any request comes after 20 minute its again start,
The problem is that the first visit to an app pool needs to create a new w3wp.exe worker process which is slow because the app pool needs to be created, ASP.NET or another framework needs to be loaded, and then your application needs to be loaded. so it may take time 20-30 seconds or depends on the application content size.
Solution
so to avoid this type of delay we need to set the idle time out to 0.
now it will always load fast.
app pool setting
The IIS application pool is shut down after 30 minutes of inactivity. After that, when you make a request IIS basically has to start the website up again, which leads to the behavior you are describing. You can change the idle time of your website in IIS though to avoid it.
You could also look into the Auto-Start feature of the 4.0 framework.
Well, a bit late, but may help someone else. I had the same problem, nothing in the logs, spent days, then looking at the network adapter properties / configuration / power management - Allow computer to shut down save power was checked. Unchecked and the problem was solved.

Memory uses by aspnet_wp.exe

I am having an asp.net 2.0 web application running from Visual studio 2005. The initial memory consumption for aspnet_wp.exe is about 2K. As i navigate different pages having GridView and other controls the size is increasing (around 47K).
My question is, if i am closing the browser why not the memory is released or even if i close the VS2005 still the memory consumption is the same.
I have checked all open db connections and closed them carefully, still the problem exists. Could some one guide me why this is happening and what is the resolution?
Thanks for sharing your valuable time.
Closing the browser only does things on the client side. The ASP.NET worker process is a server process that stays active waiting for new hosts. I don't claim to know much about how all of that works but I can say that the server process isn't going to throw everything away especially if it has loaded libraries into memory to be made available for other client connections.
closing the browser or closing the VS2005 doesn't necessary trigger the garbage collection to collect the memory. How long will the memory stay high? What happens after 5, 10 minutes?
AppDomains can take up to 30 seconds to completely shut down. This means that it could take up to 30 seconds for all memory to be freed from the process once you shut down the host server.

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