Digital Meld

For the last month or so, we’ve been seeing an increasing number of instances in which our heavily used SharePoint intranet sites were becoming un-responsive due to "out of memory" errors.  On 3/12 I modified the application pool configurations for two of these sites so that they would automatically recycle once they consumed 1300 MB of virtual memory.  I’ve found that 1300 MB is the sweet spot and you’ll usually start experiencing stability issues with the worker process if you get much further than that.  Keep in mind that even though the virtual memory limit is 2GB for a user mode process on a 32-bit system, you’ll start having problems long before you actually hit the ceiling of that limit. 

This change has only been in place for about 2 weeks, but already we are seeing significant improvements in the stability of the applications.  Referencing the event logs for Event ID 1073, I found that just between the dates of 2/26 – 3/11 (prior to the change) we had 18 out of memory errors.  Here are our stats since setting the virtual memory limits on 3/12:

• 56 automatic app pool recycles – These are graceful recycles which have zero negative impact to the end user
• 0 out of memory errors
• 0 support calls from users stating that the intranet sites were down

You’ll want to continuously monitor the recycle stats and adjust the limits as needed, but making this simple change can go a long way towards making your life easier as an administrator and keeping your customers happy.