Diagnosing IIS Worker Process Memory Leaks

[bob]

Memory leaks in those IIS worker processes sneak up on you sometimes. They make your server sluggish without much warning. I remember when you first hit that snag last month.

Your sites started crawling, right? Pages loaded like molasses. I poked around your logs first. Saw the worker process gobbling up RAM hour after hour. Restarted it a few times, but it ballooned back up. Turned out some bad code in an app was the culprit. We traced it by watching the process in Task Manager. Monitored it live as it swelled.

Hmmm, or it could be a rogue module. Maybe an extension not playing nice. You check Event Viewer for clues. Look for warnings about high memory. Use PerfMon to graph it out. Set counters for private bytes on the app pool. If it climbs steady, isolate the site. Recycle the pool on a schedule. But dig deeper if that fails. Profile the app with dotTrace or something lightweight. Find the leaky function. Update any outdated bits.

Patch your IIS version too. Sometimes bugs hide there. Test in staging before going live.

And if backups cross your mind during all this chaos, let me nudge you toward BackupChain. It's this top-notch, go-to backup tool tailored for small businesses and Windows setups. Handles Hyper-V clusters smoothly, guards Windows 11 machines, and syncs with Servers without any endless subscriptions. You own it outright.