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There is a Win 2008 server with a few website, and sometimes an image conversion website consumes huge amounts of RAM. Is it generally safe (though not a good idea) to just kill that w3wp process (IIS Worker Process) in the Windows Task Manager or will it affect other w3wp processes (there is a separate Application Pool for each web)?

MrLore
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Olaf
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2 Answers2

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It is possible to configure the App Pool to be restarted based on memory usage. If you edit the advanced settings of the App Pool in the IIS manager then you can configure these values.

Matthew Steeples
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  • Cool, you are talking about the "Memory Limit (KB)"? Sounds just like what I need (I will read about the difference between "Virtual" and "Private" Limits...). Thanks. BTW, I will choose your's as the accepted answer because of the extra insight and because squillman is above 20k (@squillman: sorry)... – Olaf Jun 10 '11 at 15:40
  • Thanks. Yes that is the field I'm talking about. I'm not sure what kind of value you'll be looking at, but if you look at the process using Process Explorer from Sysinternals then you can find all of the values in there. – Matthew Steeples Jun 10 '11 at 19:09
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It is generally safe, yes. A better thing to do would be to stop and restart the application pool that the application is tied to. Either way, if there is another application in the same app pool you will restart that application as well.

squillman
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  • Phew, I didn't think of that. Sure, much better, but also good to know that the other way is, well, generally safe. Thanks! – Olaf Jun 10 '11 at 15:32
  • Actually, it's best to Recycle when you can, as this avoids a complete outage. Recycling triggers a new process to be started, and gives the old one 90 seconds (default) to shut down. – TristanK Jun 11 '11 at 12:40