Network Management

High memory usage on IIS Worker Process (w3wp.exe) when using the SolarWinds Platform Web Console

The IIS Worker Process (w3wp.exe) is consuming more than 700 MB RAM on the SolarWinds Platform Web Server. This will cause issues when using the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

First published date

4/5/2019 8:33 PM

Last published date

7/15/2025 3:52 PM

Overview

The Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Worker Process (w3wp.exe) is consuming more than 700 MB RAM on the SolarWinds Platform Server.

    Product section

    Orion Platform

    Cause

    A healthy IIS Server will consume approximately 300 - 600 MB, maybe 700 MB RAM when busy. When it uses more than 700 MB RAM, it's telling you that:

    • You have a lot of concurrent web users.
    • The resources loaded on the web console are intensive.
    • You have multiple rotating NOC screens.
    • One user may have multiple tabs open.
    • Multiple users can log in with only one account.
    • Browsers are set to auto-refresh the page every five minutes.
    • Sessions were left open with auto-logout settings disabled.

    Resolution

    In general, if you are going to have more than 10 or 20 simultaneous web console users, SolarWinds recommends using an Additional Web Server  to remove the IIS load from the main polling engine. 

    By deploying an Additional Web Server, the SolarWinds Platform Web Console can run on a machine other than the main server. This configuration enables greater user access without impacting performance, as well as increased scalability and flexibility.

    You could see IIS or the w3wp.exe process fail altogether before seeing memory usage high by this process. See below:

    You may need to optimize certain settings in advanced settings of IIS. Recycling settings such as the 'Regular Time Interval' setting can be tweaked to not recycle the application pool on a second by second basis, value = '0'. '0' value may cause memory issues on the server. We suggest if there are memory issues entering a value greater than 0 like 5 minutes.
     

    • Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
    • In the Connections pane, expand the server name, and then click Application Pools.
    • In the Application Pools pane, select the application pool you want edit.
    • In the Actions pane, click Recycling.. Expand, find setting Regular Time Interval (minutes)
    • Change value greater than '0'