What is the ASP.NET process for IIS 7.0? - asp.net

Looking at what's running and nothing jumps out.
Thanks!

It should be w3wp.exe
EDIT: In line with Darren's comment, you should also check the "Show processes from all users" in Task Manager if that is where you are looking for the process.

Just to add something here, process explorer comes in handy when trying to track down a process:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
Beats task manager hands down and can be substituted.

make sure you have show all processes checked (in vs)

Furthermore if you need to look at the .NET/unmanaged stack just donwload Process Explorer and look at your w3wp.exe processes to examine memory and other stats without having to do a remote/local debugging (just look at the .NET Tab on the properties of the process). It will show all the .NET performance counters for that particular process.
Awesome tool!

Using TaskManager should show you the process W3WP.exe is the IIS worker process, if you have multiple instances adding the Column "Command Line" will show you which Application Pool is being hosted on each of them in the -ap switch.
Also, in the IIS Manager UI there is a "Worker Processes" feature that if you double click that you will see the list of processes, Memory and CPU they are consuming, and double clicking the instance will show you the list of executing requests on it, really useful when trying to figure out a "misbehaving" request.

Related

Allow long running admin page in Sitecore

I've got an admin .aspx page that I need to run on an instance to iterate through a bunch of items and fix some Worflow fields that aren't set properly. It's got to get through a lot of items. I ran it on my dev machine and it worked fine. It took a really long time, but completed.
Now, I'm trying to run the same page in the client's environment and I keep getting an HttpException: Request timed out error.
I just need to run this thing once. Any thoughts on why it won't run there and how to make it so I can get it to complete?
In .NET There is a executionTimeout. This time-out applies only if the debug attribute in the compilation element is False. This can explain the different behavior on your dev vs production
msdn
An other option is the app pool recycle setting.
Try the following:
Open IIS, and Select "Advanced Settings" for your Application Pool
Set the Ping Maximum Response Time to a larger number, note its in seconds
Reset those values back to the original value, once the task is done
Hope This helps

How to know which w3wp process is for the intranet appication I am looking for

I have to take memory dump of IIS process for investigating an issue via Windbg. I basically have four intranet applications that run on same IIS server. This mean that I see four w3wp process. Is there someway of finding which process is tied to which IIS application? I know I can use Process Explorer from sysinternals that show various threads and even their call stacks, however, all my intranet applications uses common libraries and sometime stack could be very similar. Wondering if there is any better way of figuring this out.
The name of the application pool is passed as a command line parameter to w3wp.exe.
w3wp.exe -ap "MyApplicationPoolName" ... [the rest of command line]
I usually just use Windows Task Manager, it can display command line for processes if you configure it to display this column in View menu. Alternatively, tlist.exe from the debugger package can do that too:
tlist w3wp.exe
May be 'appcmd list apps' will do the trick.
Refer to http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/114/getting-started-with-appcmdexe/

ASP.NET 2.0 application never loads

I have an application that runs perfectly fine locally using the VS 2010 application server, however, when I deploy to our web app machine startup just spins and spins and never loads. We have other apps on this same machine that load just fine (this is a debug deployment of same app in product).
I have been spinning my wheels on this for days and I am at a loss as the problem could be.
Here is what I did
Create a new directory (same level as other apps)
Copied over our existing test (www.domain/test/) and it works fine
Build and publish new debug app (www.domain/test/) and it just spins trying to load first form.
I know the diretory is "working" as the 'test' application I put there works fine.
If it's killing the App pool, you might get something in the event log. Fiddler (www.fiddlertool.com) is great http debug tool which let you see if you're in a redirect loop. Also Firefox shows a more meaningful error, something about exceeding the max redirect count.
It does sound like something is looping, but not quick enough to cause a stack overflow, which is odd, because you'd expect it to fail every time.
Simon
Do you have the ability to remote desktop into the machine? If so try running process explorer and look at the process details for the worker process that is giving you issues. Definitely look at the TCP connections being created. If your processor is pegged at 100%, and memory usage is rising then you probably have an endless loop running.
It sounds like it's more related to IIS than ASP.NET. What about the identity that the website is running under? Is it possible that the user the site's running under a bad user, or maybe the password needs to be re-entered?
I did a quick Bing search
There are a lot of postings regarding the error message you described above. Most if not all point to code in your app that is crashing. I know I had a similar problem when I used an automated/threaded daemon utility in my web application. Make sure your code is not bringing down the server, sometimes the VS2010 web server is a little more foregiving than an actual IIS deployment.
If that doesn't work try running a Remote Debugging Session to try and catch any errors being thrown but not handled.
Lastly you could try to setup a new local IIS server to see if you have the same problems. Scott Gu has a nice article about using IIS Express to do this.

Is it possible to debug IIS without affecting all users of the service?

This may seem like a silly question, but we are having an issue debugging IIS in a shared test environment and I'm hoping that someone out there can give us an answer.
We have a Windows Server 2003 that is running IIS 6 and sharepoint 2007. We are debugging locally on the server with visual studio 2008.
When someone attaches the debugger and steps through the code, we find that all users are affected. In essence the web server stops handling all requests from all users.
Our question is whether this is a typical situation and is to be expected? Or is there some configuration that we can change that would allow the one user's session to be debugged but leave the other's unaffected.
Kev's on the right track. You need to make sure that the project you want to debug separate from the others is in its own application pool. This will isolate it to its own process and allow that process to be stopped/debugged without affecting the other applications which can remain in a different pool.
Setup
Start -> Run -> inetmgr
Right Click on Application Pools
Click New -> Application Pool
Name the new pool
Right Click on the application you want to isolate
Click Properties
Click on the Home Directory tab
In the application pool drop-down list select your new pool
Click OK
If there are any requests queued in the old process, they may take a few minutes to terminate before all requests are being diverted to the new process.
Debugging
To figure out which instance of w3wp.exe you need to attach the debugger to:
Start -> Run -> cmd
Type iisapp
You may be prompted to register CScript, if so click yes and run it again
The only gotcha you may still find is that if multiple applications are using the aspnet_state service you may run into blocking issues if you need to debug that process as well.
Links
MSDN
Developer.com
"When someone attaches the debugger
and steps through the code, we find
that all users are affected. In
essence the web server stops handling
all requests from all users."
This is normal, once you attach a debugger to a process such as inetinfo.exe or w3wp.exe and set a break point, every request/thread will be blocked until you allow the debugger to continue, until the next break-point.
I've never found a way around it. Is there some reason you can't debug on each developer's workstation?
Set up a parallel project on the server and try using that. You could use debug.mydomain.com and then just use that for testing. The only reason that I personally can think of to debug on your live servers is if there is a significant difference in the functioning of your app due to either hardware or software configuration.
Ideally you want to have a separate server/instance of your system in as similar an environment as possible so that you don't have to debug on your live machine. Also you might want to consider writing all errors to the event log or at least checking the log since asp.net usually get logged there. This way you can see where your errors are and use that to help you solve your problem in the development environment.
I believe in visual studio you can set the debugger to break only the process being debugged, and not all the processes. Depending on how your system is set up, YMMV with this.
It can't be changed AFAIK. But that's a normal practice to set up separate web-node or web-application for development/debugging purposes. If that's necessary to know exact values of some vars in certain situations you can always use debug logging.

ASP.NET Application Deployment Issue

I have deployed an application written in ASP.NET 2.0 into production and it's experiencing some latency issues. Pages are taking about 4-5 seconds to load. GridView refreshing are taking around the same time to load.
The app runs fine on the develpment box. I did the following investigation on the server
Checked the available memory ... 80% used.
Cheched the processor ... 1%
Checked disk IO from perfmon, less than 15%
The server config is
Windows Server 2003 Sp2
Dual 2.0 GZH
2GB RAM
Running SQL Server 2005 and IIS only
Is there anything else I can troubleshoot? I also checked the event log for errors, it's clean.
EDITED ~ The only difference I just picked up is on the DEV box I am using IE7 and the clients are using IE6 - Could this be an issue?
UPDATE ~ I updated all clients to IE8 and noticed a 30% increase in the performance. I finally found out I left my debug=true in the web.config file. Setting that to flase got the app back to the stable performance... I still can't believe I did that.
First thing I would do is enable tracing. (see: https://web.archive.org/web/20210324184141/http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/081501-1.shtml)
then add tracing points to your page generation code to give you an idea of how long each part of the page build takes:
System.Diagnostics.Trace.Write(
"Starting Page init",
"TraceCheck");
//Init page
System.Diagnostics.Trace.Write(
"End Page init",
"TraceCheck");
System.Diagnostics.Trace.Write(
"Starting Data Fetch",
"TraceCheck");
//Get Data
System.Diagnostics.Trace.Write(
"End Data Fetch",
"TraceCheck");
etc
this way you can see exactly how long each stage is taking and then target that area.
Double check that you application is not running in debug mode. In your web.config file check that the debug attribute under system.web\compilation is set to false.
Besides making the application run slower and using more system memory you will also experience slow page loading since noting is cached when in debug mode.
Also check your page size. A developer friend of mine once loaded an entire table into viewstate. A 12 megabyte page will slip by when developing on your local machine, but becomes immediately noticeable in production.
Are you running against the same SQL Server as in your tests or a different one?
In order to find out where the time's coming from you could add some trace statements to your page load, and then load the page with tracing turned on. That might help point to the problem.
Also, what are the specs of your development box? The same?
Depending on the version of visual studio you have, Team Developer has a Performance Wizard you might want to investigate.
Also, if you use IE 8, it has a Profiler which will let you see how long the site takes to load in the browser itself. One of the first things to determine is whether the time is client side or server side.
If client side, start looking at what javascript you have and optimize / get rid of it.
If server side, you need to look at all of the performance counters (perfmon). For example, we had an app that crawled on the production servers due to a tremendous amount of JIT going on.
You also need to look at the communication between the web and database server. How long are queries taking? Are the boxes thrashing the disk drives? etc.

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