CLR Unreleased Resources

[falco]

I have a complex web application that keeps increasing aspnet_wp.exe memory usage. Even when the web app is no longer being used, the memory usage does not decrease. CLR never reclaims the memory, even after several days. I suspect that there are unmanaged resources that are not being released. The app is only partially written by me, so there are 1,000s of lines of code that I don't want to dig in to.

 

Is there a way to view what objects are being held in memory?

 

Thanks,

Rick Deigsler

[Nerseus]

There are a couple of known bugs that will cause memory leaks in aspnet_wp.exe, I'd check htt://support.microsoft.com for info there.

 

I've only used memory tools for local projects - haven't had the need to do so on a webserver. If you search Google for something like "memory leak ASP.NET" or just "memory leak .NET" you get a lot of good hits.

 

I did have one ASP.NET app that was, by itself, killing the webserver by eating up too much memory. It was a webpage that was trying to load a DataSet with about 6 million rows (bad WHERE clause, BAD!). Combine all that memory with the fact that we had the threshold for memory set too high and the machine would just hang. You can specify a value on the webserver that will reset IIS (or maybe it just kills aspnet_wp.exe, I can't remember) when memory hits a certain upper limit. On our DEV server this was something like 99999999999 or the equivalent (our IS guy laughed when he saw it).

 

-ner

[falco]

Thanks for the info!

[PlausiblyDamp]

The CLRProfiler tool can be useful to find what resources are being allocated where, it can be found here