W3WP.EXE still exists, but not responding...

[James Hunter Ross]

Friends,

We are preparing for Beta release of a new ASP.NET project, but our initial
in-house tests are not going well. We have had W3WP.exe (and aspnet_wp.exe)
die, and we feel we can monitor it's death and sometimes get useful
information out of the DMP file.

But lately, W3WP.exe lives, but appears hung. New request to the
application hang unresponsive, existing user sessions are unresponsive, and
eventually session timeout and go away. W3WP.exe had grown to around 250mb,
but we have a full 2gb on the test server, so doubt this is a memory thing.
Recycling that App Pool starts a new W3WP.exe, and folks can login to our
app and begin again. The "hung" W3WP.exe lives until we kill it.

I don't know were to begin. Has anybody seen W3WP.exe stop serving things?
How might we proceed? (Debugging doesn't seem possible since we need a real
server load to get this situation to occur.)

Any thoughts, words, or links will be very much appreciated! Thanks in
advance.

James Hunter Ross

 

[Lau Lei Cheong]

Give brief description about what operations your web application is
supposed to perform, than someone might be able to help you guess what's
going wrong. (e.g.: Whether accept upload files, control hardware, use other
3rd party COM objects, etc.)

 

[James Hunter Ross]

We query a DB using our own API, display records in a grid, allow add and
update, etc. Mostly Web Form stuff. The bottom line is that the worker
process stop responding, CPU use that process is zero, and I don't knwo how
to even begin to track this down.

James

 

[Lau Lei Cheong]

Is your W3WP.EXE really stop responding? You can try adding an ASPX page
with one literal control that on the Page_Load of code-behind will output
some server-side value like the current username or a value in Session
variables.

When the w3wp.exe appears hang, try browse that page. If it can successfully
display, then the w3wp.exe is not hang, just for some reason cannot display
your page correctly.

Concerning memory problem, seems your web application will store data in
memory until your session timeouts and GC recollected the space. Actually if
I were you, I'll try to use DataReader to read data and write my own routine
to "draw" the table myself, so I can free the datareader once I finish
rendering the table, but then it'll be less productive... you'll decide
yourself whether you have time to try this out and see if there's any
difference... (I think this may not be the best way to do this, you can also
wait to see if others have other inputs)