AspNet Process Memory Issue on Win2k Server - Peformance is fine - Memory usuage doesn't stop growing

[Cy Huckaba]

We are running our company website on a win2k server running .NET framework 1.0
and IIS 5. The pages consist of mostly static content built from a combination
of custom controls (dll is only 148k total), user controls and straight html
content. I am very strict about only using server-side controls when absolutely
necessary.

I have output caching turned on every page and user control; we do not hit any
databases; a couple of pages use xml files for data but have double checked my
code and am releasing the resources once they are used (I don't rely on the
garbage collector); I have added caching to my custom controls in line with the
ASP.Net optimization techniques found in various microsoft documents;
Performance has never been an issue for this site, it has always been fast, we
have been running it since october of last year.

My question is, if I have done all of these things in order to streamline the
code and make it fast, why does the amount of memory used by the aspnet_wp
process continually grow until it has to shut itself down and recover?

I have modified the processModel section in the machine.config file set to make
sure it doesn't get into deadlock situations, etc. I have implemented cache
viewer scripts and process monitors to make sure that everything seemend to be
working like they should be and it all seems to work...that memory usage still
keeps growing.

Can anyone explain this? Is this by design? Are there any other techniques I can
use to force the release of certain resources without restarting the process
over and over again?

Any thoughts or article links would be great, thank you,

Cy Huckaba

[Xie Xiao]

Hi Cy,

First of all you may want to make sure that you have .NET Framework v1.0
SP2 installed. This addresses several known issues we had.

If this is to no avail, I guess you may need to do some debugging on the
problem. Try to find out the constitutes of the managed heap and see
whether there are some big guys there holding the memory. The following
article should get you started:

[url]http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnbda/html/DBGch02.asp[/url]

See what those big guys are and try to release them in time.

Sincerely,
Xiao Xie
Microsoft Developer Support

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