Windows Memory maxing out/ possible leakage

[sist_si]

Hi all,
I'm having some trouble with a server. It's installed with 2Gb RAM, Windows 2000 Server and hosts about 60-70 websites. Some of these websites are fairly heavy usage (say 6 or 7) and the others are next to nothing in comparison.

The sites are pretty much all ASP using either SQL Server or Access.

Over the last year, we've basically had to reset the server on a nightly basis due to it either crashing or more frequently, running out of memory.

Now, this morning, we had the memory max out and had to restart IIS and SQL server to free up resources as we had a HTTP 1.1 message saying there wasn't enough memory to create Session. This is almost certainly memory leaking isn't it?

Anyway, everything was until about 8:30 tonight when the same thing happened!
I checked and noticed the following:

1. The 'big' sites we split out as we thought they'd be the leak culprits we're all on low memory usage (11Mb each). These earlier had been quite big and some were rising.
2. The pooled websites process was using 155Mb of memory.
3. SQL Server was using 800Mb of memory. This is ok though isn't it? SQL Server manages itself I thought?
4. The inetinfo.exe process was using 55Mb. Now, I have read that this is sometimes a memory hog as SMTP uses it. If our server was being used as a relay (even if it blocked attempts) this could hog memory. Am I right in being suspicious of it? It's worth me mentioning actually that our server sends out A LOT of mails. Thousands.

Sorry for the mammoth post but i really want to get to the bottom of this bad boy. At the moment, my money is on a website in the pooled IIS process but i really don't know!!!?!

Thanks in advance.

 

[JonC]

It does sound like memory leaking, but I think it's usually difficult to track down. I would suggest searching online for problems with the particular servers you are running, as I imagine you will not be alone in your troubles.

Having no experience with the servers you talk about:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811140/

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/14282/14282.html


What I would suggest is to watch the amount of memory each of the processes on your server uses over time, and try and pin down one that is simply increasing over time. The SQL server at 800mb could be the culprit, but it depends on the configuration etc.

It may also be possible that there isn't a memory leak, but you have the various servers configured so that they can use as much memory as they like, and so they just aren't freeing it up as much as they could be. But that's just a stab in the dark.

 

[sist_si]

Thanks for your help JonC. I'm running a Performance Monitor log at the moment to try and determine if we have a memory leak. I'll give it till this afternoon to see what happens.

I'm going to look into capping the max memory SQL Server can use as well. It is set pretty high at the moment which leads me to think it's never been capped.
I've just got to find out the implications of limiting it.