Environment:
Windows 2003 Server (32 bit); IIS6, ASP.NET 2.0 (3.5); 4Gb Ram; 1 Worker Process
We have a situation where we have a very large System.XmlDocument is being loaded into memory, and then it heads into a complied XSL transform.
What is happening is when a web request comes in the server is sitting in an idle state with 2500Mb of available system memory.
As the XML DOM is populated, the available memory drops approx 500Mb at which point we get a System.OutOfMemoryException event. At this point the system should theoretically still have 2000Mb of available memory available to service the request (according to Perfmon).
The related questions I have are:
1) At what level in the stack is this out of memory limitation being met? OS? IIS? ASP.NET? worker process? Is this a per individual web request limit?
2) Is this limit configurable somewhere?
3) Why can’t this web request access the full available system memory?
Best Answer
1) I would guess at the worker process but this should be configurable within IIS to the limit of memory that a worker process can use. Another factor is what level of bits does your software use, e.g. 32 bit has a physical limit of 4 GB since this is the total address space.
2) Probably but don't forget that memory fragmentation may play a role in getting to out of memory faster than you think, e.g. if there is a memory request for a contiguous 1000 Mb piece of memory then this may not necessarily be found in the current memory.
3) Have you examined dump data to see what is in the memory when the exception gets thrown? If not, there are ways to get a snapshot of the memory to see what it looks like as this may give you more clues about what is going on.