"POTENTIAL MEMORY LEAK FOR PROCESS: w3wp" - What are the causes and possible solutions

BKBK 6

Do you have any tips on the warning, "POTENTIAL MEMORY LEAK FOR PROCESS", which appears on the Failures section of our Azure Application Insights page?
See attached images.

We suddenly began to see the warning of recent. The warning shows 3 tabs, one for each of the following processes:

w3wp
w3wp#2
w3wp#4

I know that these are IIS worker processes. However, I am still at a loss.

Which IIS instance(s)/installation(s) is the warning referring to? How do I get more information about the warning or the processes? How do I reduce the changes of a w3wp memory leak?

I would be grateful for your help.

BKBK 6 Reputation points

2021-09-02T17:29:34.59+00:00

The attachments
Lex Li (Microsoft) 4,742 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-09-02T20:29:15.92+00:00

Escalate to the developers of this web application, so that they can check if anything is incorrect. The warnings themselves are not very helpful, as they seem to be sent whenever memory usage of w3wp.exe goes high enough. But that kind of memory usage can be normal.
Bruce Zhang-MSFT 3,736 Reputation points

2021-09-03T01:47:49.52+00:00

Hi @BKBK ,

The attachments show that the issue is related to Azure. Azure engineers will help you once they the issue.

About IIS, the information I can provide is all application pools will create worker processes named w3wp.exe when they run. You can check these worker processes in task manager and remember their PID. Then you can know the application pool in worker processes module of IIS according to PID.
BKBK 6 Reputation points

2021-09-03T13:49:50.047+00:00

Hi @Anonymous and @Bruce Zhang-MSFT ,
Thanks for your insightful comments. It's clear to me now what's going on.