Page 2 - Management - Bumping up Memory Use

even if you will get it working, without changing the code it will happen again.
the code is bad.

it flood the Session with tons of data, that's the reason for the Out Of Memory
problems. even if you'll have 20 Giga of memory, at some point when the websites
will have heavy traffic, the server will crash.

you need to change the logic and use Database instead of Session to store
the shopping carts of the users.

Agreed; but I do not control that, I cannot change the code on the wholesale level that would probably be required. I'm not even sure how I would go about finding where the memory leak is. We're talking about thousands and thousands of lines of code I have never seen on a site I have nothing to do with. The vendor is refusing to do anything. So unless I can come up with some proof and point at the problem directly it's a dead end even though I am 100% convinced it's the right solution.

From what I can tell, IIS simply will not use more than 2 gigs of memory on our system were 4 gigs is installed. Regardless of issues with the code, I find that to be a problem on a dedicated machine. I simply would like it to use the resources given to it. Is that unreasonable of me?

you have full error message.
you know the code that causing the leak: the code that is using Sessions
without ever considering what happens if there's heavy traffic.

imagine that your car suddenly stopped working. you go to the garage
and ask them to fix it.

after couple of days they call you and give you the car, saying that
it's now driving well.

you start driving, and find that it can't drive more than 10 Miles Per Hour.

The car is driving, no doubting that.
but it's very limited, and surely not what you intended.
the garage made sloppy and bad job on the car.

it's exactly the same in your case: whoever wrote the code
gave you something that work, up to some specific point.

Is it only using 2Gb even out of isolation mode?

Correct, our metric show 50% as the most we have ever used. Currently, the site is running reasonably well so this is bordering academics. However, I agree that the real problem isn't solved.

Again, I agree wholeheartedly that there is a serious issue in the code. But, to use the analogy, I build the roads, not the car. If there are two lanes I want cars to use both regardless of how slow they go.

Is there a way to track the number of sessions, how long the sessions are sticking around, and what sort of resources individual sessions are taking? Not knowing the code or being an ASP expert I would assume that code making use of the sessions is everywhere. If I can point to some figures showing ridiculous amounts of resources for sessions then I have something worthwhile to complain to the vendor about.

you can reduce the Session Time Out, setting this to, for example, 10 minutes
is pretty reasonable.
this will cause that Sessions will be killed after 10 minutes (instead of the default
20 minutes) and hopefully release memory faster.

Yep, we ratcheted that stuff back when we came out of isolation mode.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions. I know we haven't 'fixed' anything but the site seems to be limping along which was ultimately our goal. It gives us the breathing room to see if we can figure out the real problem.

Sorry, been busy with Tomcat and IIS problems myself...grrr...

Anyhow, IIS will use by default approx half available RAM for caching - so I guess from that, the other 50% is for application code. There is a registry setting you can fiddle with to make that more or less, do a google on IIS infrastructure site:microsoft.com and hopefully you'll find the article I found...

Secondly, you may be able to track number of sessions etc using perfmon - surely there'd be some IIS metrics in there? Haven't looked as yet, as I said, been busy with my own IIS demons

It would be interesting to see what is going on with your sessions, whether they are hanging around too long, etc. There might be a way to expire all sessions at a particular time, dunno if you can get something to fire at the Application_End (or whatever) event (last person leaves the site).

Indeed there is...

In ASP.NET Applications there is a few listings under Sessions...