Assign more memory to w3wp worker processes

Question

My workers processes cap out at 70mB. How do I raise this limit? I have 4Gb on Windows 2003 IIS6. Thanks!

Answer 1

If by "cap out", you mean "consume and stay stable", the short answer is that you don't.

The memory limits for recycling are the point at which the process gets shot and killed, but the process needs to grow to that size first.

Bad Simile Warning

It's like having a policy that any plant growing taller than 1 metre will be ripped out and re-seeded. If the plant grows to 1 metre, it gets ripped out; if it only ever grows to 20cm, it'll be left alone.

There's no way you can artificially inflate a worker process' memory use (other than "write bad or unoptimized code") - busy static file serving sites sometimes run at less than 100MB per worker process, because they've less than 100MB content to serve in the first place.

If your sites are performing well, rejoice! They won't be pulled from their flower bed.

Answer 2

In Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, go to Application Pools, choose your web application/site's pool and under Recycling choose the limit of maximum virtual memory the worker process can consume until it gets recycled.

This blog post on MSDN explains when to configure memory recycling:

When to configure Memory Recycling In most scenarios, recycling based on a schedule should be sufficient in order to “refresh” the worker processes at specific points in time. Note that the periodic recycle is the default, with a period of 29 hours (1740 minutes). This can be an inconvenience, since each recycle would occur at different times of a day, eventually occurring during peak times.

If you have determined that you have to recycle your application pool based on memory threshold, it implies that you have established a baseline for your application and that you know your application’s memory usage patterns. This is a very important assumption, since in order to properly configure memory thresholds you need to understand how the application is using memory, and when it is appropriate to recycle the application based on that usage.

Answer 3

Open inetmgr on the server (run + inetmgr), go to the properties of the application pools, and in the memory recycling section you can specify how much virtual memory the pools will use.