title: Is there a memory limit for w3wp.exe?
body: <p>Is there a max memory size for w3wp.exe? Mine is getting up to about 2.5-3G then seems to crash/reset. </p>
  
  <p>Per the "<strong>GIVEN</strong>" dimensions below I setup some counters and noticed that the w3wp.exe will service http requests then reset to 0 along with the w3wp.exe process crashing (changing pids). As a result REQUESTS_QUEUED and ACTIVE_REQUESTS grow large causing delays in processing until the w3wp.exe can restart itself.  It's doing this every 3-4min so more than likely due to heavy system volume during peak load.  But not sure if it's a memory issue or not.</p>
  
  <p>I see tons of warnings in my webserver (IIS) log:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>A process serving application pool 'MyApplication' suffered a fatal
    communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The
    process id was '1732'. The data field contains the error number.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>RESULT: Customers are reporting sporadic response times for http requests.</p>
  
  <p>Can I increase this memory limit or reconfigure IIS to handle increased load?</p>
  
  <p><strong>GIVEN</strong>:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>System has been passed down to me so there may be gaps with IIS configuration, etc.  </li>
  <li>Database: SQL Server 2008R2  </li>
  <li>Web Servers: Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise SP1  (64bit, 64G RAM)</li>
  <li>IIS 7.5  </li>
  <li>Using MVC4 Web API with MemoryCache aggressively with Model and Business Objects with eviction set to 2hrs  </li>
  <li>Looked at the logs but really don't see anything significantly relevant  </li>
  <li>One application pool...no other LOB applications running on this server  </li>
  </ul>