Use this tab to administrate the recycling of worker processes. In worker process isolation mode, you can configure IIS to periodically restart worker processes in an application pool, allowing you to manage precisely those worker processes that are faulty. This ensures that specified applications in those pools remain healthy, and that system resources can be recovered.

To recycle a worker process, the ability of the faulty worker process to receive requests is throttled until it completes processing of all remaining requests that it has stored in the request queue. To drain its current requests, the process is given a configured limit. A replacement worker process for the same namespace group starts before the old worker process stops. This prevents service interruptions. The old process completes its outstanding requests, and then shuts down normally or is explicitly terminated if it does not shut down after a configurable time limit, number of requests, on a set schedule, or when a specified limit of memory usage is reached.

Recycle worker processes (in minutes)

Select to recycle worker processes after a specific period of inactivity.

Recycle worker process (number of requests)

Select to recycle worker processes after a specific number of requests.

Recycle worker processes at the following times

Select to use a scheduling scheme to shut down a process and start a replacement.

Add

Click to add a time of day to the scheduled-based worker process recycling criteria.

Remove

Click to remove the currently selected scheduled-based criteria for worker process recycling.

Edit

Click to modify the currently selected scheduled-based criteria for worker process recycling.

Recycle worker process after consuming too much memory

This option allows use of a memory consumption limit scheme to shut down a process and start a replacement. These settings control the memory recycling thresholds when the amount of virtual memory or private memory used by a worker process becomes too high in relation to total system memory. Memory-based recycling is suited for reducing heap fragmentation and recovering memory from applications with memory leaks.

Maximum virtual memory

Select to set the maximum number of megabytes of your system’s common virtual memory to be used by a worker process before that process is recycled.

Entering too high a value can severely decrease system performance. As a starting point, use the default value and work down to the lowest value possible while maintaining good performance.

Maximum used memory

Select to set the maximum number of megabytes of privately allocated system physical memory to be used by a worker process before the process is recycled.

Entering too high a value can severely decrease system performance. As a starting point, use the default value and work down to the lowest value possible while maintaining good performance.

Related Topics

To learn more about worker processes and recycling, see the IIS 6.0 online documentation on the Microsoft Windows Server TechCenter.