IIS 6 RAM Allocation on Windows Server 2003 - asp.net

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.

Related

w3wp.exe runs out of memory even though there's still memory available

We're running into a strange problem. Our ASP.NET application is running on 64-bit Windows 2008/IIS7 machine with 16Gb of RAM. When w3wp.exe process reaches 4Gb (we track it simple via Task Manager on the server) - Out of Memory exeption is thrown even though there's a plenty of memory still available.
Is there a known issue were ASP.NET process is limited to 4Gb of memory on 64bit system (and using 64bit app pool)?
Is there any way to lift that limit?
It kind of sounds like you have an undisposed resource somewhere that ends up getting garbage collected eventually, but not quickly enough for your needs. Do you reuse any SQLConnection objects? Or MailClient objects? Or unmanaged Image objects?
As for the lower-than-expected memory limit, there are two types of memory use by a ASP.NET app. One is reserved memory and the other is actually used memory. I believe the task manager tracks actual memory use, but reserved memory probably also has a limit. To find out how much reserved memory your process is taking up, go to IIS7, click on the server (the top level, above app pools and sites folder), then click the Processes option and then click your app's process. It should show you CPU use, number of requests and memory usage (both reserved and actual).

asp.net runs fast then slow on restart

Why is it that every time the server goes down, and asp.net restarts, the response time is SUPER FAST when it comes back up for a few minutes. I assume because everyone is off the server and I am one of the few (or only) people back on the server so quick?
I have discussed this with our developers and they say the response time is due to everyone on the server normally (200+ desktops) and when you are the only person on there, it flys. Really? Then does that mean we need newer, faster web servers?
I am not a programmer, but I think there may be two answers, one is what the devs say above is true, and two is the system is accumulating temp files of some sort and they get cleared out when the server crashes and then restarts.
How do we prove who might be right? Where does one start to look for asp.net bottlenecks?
windows server 2003
asp.net 3.0
iis6
12GB ram
sql server 2005 (db admin says there is no load issue on sql..)
Some very basic steps that you can follow and check if your server work on limits are:
First you download the Process Explorer from sysinternals and you run it to see two things.
Is your server work on their memory limit ?
If yes then what program eats the memory, usually SQL Server 2005 use a lot of memory for database cache, and this is done after many time of work.
Did the server use all of his computing power, if yes, check what program is the one that need all that computing power.
Now next step, download the TCPView from sysinternals, run it and see how many connections are done, how fast, etc... There you can see anomalies, or if the computer is also on their limit.
Final step is to defrag your disks.
Also have in mine that the asp.net session is lock the entire view on all users. So if you have one application on web, with too many users, and each user, or some users, make long time processing on their calls, then this can cause delay to all the users.

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.

CPU Usage relative to number of users? - ASP.Net Application

My Asp.net application uses
25-30% of the CPU on a test server which has 600 MB Ram on it.
I can see the asp_wb process taking that much percentage of CPU.
This is when I am testing using one user.
How many users can the server afford then without falling over?
Is there a relationship between the CPU Usage and number of user aka if there are 2 users my application will sky rocket to 60% of memory usage?
Or does/Should/How does the server handle this?
The asp.net is base on pools and not on users.
Some memory per user is going on user session, but I believe that you not hold huge amount of data on sessions (did you ?).
Now I suggest ti run process explorer from sysinternals, and check on w3wp.exe the working set and the virtual size of the memory for this. You can do that by open this 2 columns on Process Memory tab.
Then you see there how many memory asp.net needs for your application.
Second step if to check how you have configure your pool by open it. Maybe you have configure it to recycle too often, or to recycle when you have more than 125k working set memory, and your program have 200k working set memory. So you need to recalibrate some values.
Together with process explorer you can see how much memory your application need, and setup correctly the pool.
Of cource maybe there are other problems and other issues with the memory but asp.net is not eat memory for every user and you need to check where your memory is used - and the process explorer is a good tool for this job.
Hope this help.

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