Day 2: Excessive memory use of w3wp.exe process

One of the most common issue in Sharepoint is the excessive use of memory of Application Pools... Day by day the w3wp.exe process grows until eats the whole amount of memory of the server. It´s very important detect this situation and prevent it...

As you can see in the image below the w3wp.exe processes are IIS Worker Processes...

 

The problem is administrators can´t do any of this actions from Task Manager:

1. We can´t identify App Pool that corresponds with the IIS Worker Process.
2. We can´t limit the memory use.

To solve the first problem, we identify the IIS Worker Process with the command %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd list wp.In Internet Information Services 6 the command is C:\Windows\System32\iisapp.vbs.

Other way to find the IIS Worker Process is open IIS Management Console. Select the hostname in the left panel and select Worker Processes in the righ panel under IIS Section.

You will find the information at one look.

 

Once we know the Application Pool name we must go to Application Pools Section and select Advanced Settings with right click.

The last setting is Virtual Memory Limit (KB) This is the max amount of memory allocated by Application Pool. When this value is exceeded the Application Pool is recycled.

The final task is recycle the App Pool for apply the changes.

By this way you can limit the amount of memory for a good performance server.