Application pool disabling - iis

I have an application in the Production environment which is Windows Server 2012/IIS 8 and is load balanced.
Recently out of nowhere, the website app pool suddenly started gettig disabled. The System Windows Logs logged the following error message by the Resource-Exhaustion-Detector ...
Application Pool 'x' is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.
Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: w3wp.exe (6604) consumed 5080641536 bytes, w3wp.exe (1572) consumed 477335552 bytes, and w3wp.exe (352) consumed 431423488 bytes.
Anyone got any idea how I figure out what is happening? We've never come across this issue before and the application has been running for a good couple of years.
Also, this isn't something that happens regularly but instead seems to happen one every day or so, and even that is at a random time. The Virtual Memory was initially 4GB but because of the issue above, we increased it to 8GB. Recently it spiked at using about 6.8GB out of 8GB, which it has no reason to do so.
Any help would be really appreciated!

The answer is easy here, obviously and certainly you have two issues here
1- You have a serious bug in your process/code that happens intermittently "you need to debug it to find how/when that happens" or at least run a ProcDump
such that you keep it listening on the server on the process W3WP till an exception happens and then analyze this dump to find where the code get stuck and consume that memory/otherwise just debug the code and see what changes were made in last few months "not days"
2- the application get stopped because you have configured/it is configured by default to get disabled break after a certain number of failure repeats, and that's a normal behavior but the main issue as I said is not the application pool itself, its inside the process
please let me know if you need a further explanation or help on this matter

Related

Azure App Service Plan CPU spikes for no obvious reason

We're experiencing CPU spikes on our Azure App Service Plan for no obvious reason. Its not something that stops the service, but we'd like to have an understanding of when&how that kind of things happen.
For example, CPU percentage sits at 0-1% range for days but then all of the sudden it spikes to 98%, 45%, 60% and comes back to 0-1% range very quickly. Memory stays unchanged at comfortable 40-45% level, no incoming requests to it, no web jobs, nothing unusual in logs, no failures, service health ok, nothing we could point our finger to as a reason.
We tried to find out through kudu > support > analyze (metrics)...but we couldn't get request submited. It just keeps giving error to try later.
There is only one web app running in that app service plan, its a asp.net core 2.0. web api.
Could someone shed some light on this kind of behavior? Is this normal, expected? If so, why it happens? Is there a danger that it spikes to 90% and don't immediately come back?
Just, what's going on?
After speaking with MS support i've got an answer it is a normal behavior coming from their monitoring tool:
We reviewed our internal tools taking as starting point 12/26 and
today 12/29 and we could notice that this was majority System
processes doing background tasks, which is normal for each sandbox
environment. In your case, it was mostly MonAgentCore.exe fluctuating
in CPU which is our diagnostic log capturing process and this looks
like a very temporary spike and appears normal.

Azure App Service: How can I determine which process is consuming high CPU?

UPDATE: I've figured it out. See the end of this question.
I have an Azure App Service running four sites. One of the sites has two deployment slots in addition to the primary one. Recently I've been seeing really high CPU utilization for the App Service plan as a whole.
The dark orange line shows the CPU percentage. This is just after restarting all my sites, which brought it down to this level.
However, when I look at the CPU use reported by each site, it's really low.
The darker blue line shows the CPU time, which is basically nothing. I did this for all of my sites, and all the graphs look the same. Basically, it seems that none of my sites are causing the issue.
A couple of the sites have web jobs, so I took a look at the logs but everything is running fine there. The jobs run for a few seconds every few hours.
So my question is: how can I determine the source of this CPU utilization? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE: Thanks to the replies below, I was able to get more detail into what was happening. I ended up getting what I needed from SCM / Kudu tools. You can get here by going to your web app in Azure and choosing Advanced Tools from the side nav. From the Kudu dashboard, choose Process Explorer. The value in the Total CPU Time column is not directly useful, because it's the time in seconds that the process has run since it started, which might have been minutes or days ago.
However, if you make a record of the value at intervals, you can look at the change over time, and one process might jump out at you. In my case, it was my WebJobs process. Every 60 seconds, this one process was consuming about 10 seconds of processor time, just within one environment.
The great thing about this Kudu dashboard is, if you can catch the problem while it is actually happening, you can hit the Start Profiling button and capture a diagnostic session. You can then open this up in Visual Studio and get some nice details about where the CPU time is being spent.
Just in case anyone else is seeing similar issues, I'll provide more details about my particular case. As I mentioned, my WebJobs exe was the culprit, and I found that all the CPU time was being spent in StackExchange.Redis.SocketManager, which manages connections to Azure Redis Cache. In my main web app, I create only one connection, as recommended. But Since my web jobs only run every once in a while, I was creating a new connection to Azure Redis Cache each time one ran, which apparently can lead to issues. I changed my code to create the Redis Cache connection once when the WebJob process starts up and use the existing connection when any individual WebJob runs.
Time will tell if this really fixes the issue, but I think it will. When the problem occurred, it always fit the same pattern: After a few days of running fine, my CPU would slowly ramp up over the course of about 12 hours. My thinking is that each time a WebJob ran, it created a connection object, which at first didn't produce trouble, but gradually as WebJobs ran every hour or two, cruft was building up until finally some critical threshold was met and the CPU usage would take off.
Hope this helps someone out there. Best wishes!
May be you should go to webApp scm?
%yourAppName%.scm.azurewebsites.com;
There is a page, that can show you all process, that runned now on your web app. (something like Console > Process).
Also you can go to support page (from scm right corner).
You can find some more info about your performance there, and make memory dump (not for this problem, but it useful for performance issues).
According to your description, I assumed that you could leverage the Crash Diagnoser extension to capture dump files from your Web Apps and WebJobs when the CPUs usage percentage is higher than the specific threshold to isolate this issue. For more details, you could refer to this official blog.

Azure Web Site CPU High at random intervals of the day

I have a Azure Web Site running for 6 months and on Friday 1st April 2016 at 09:50pm the CPU was very high and this had a impact on the performance of the web site. Stopping and restarting the web service solved the problem but it came back at 13:00pm. Since then the CPU has stayed high and making the web site un-useable
I've tried all monitoring tools, Daas, Event Logs, checked for Open Connections and ensure my software is closing or disposing objects correctly.
But the CPU is still high. Only way to resolve is to restart the web service but I dont want to keep doing this.
Has anyone else experience a similar problem and what was the solutions.
The only thing from the event logs that look an issues is the odd "A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server", which could be because the SQL Aure is not available.
Please help
Hmmm, high cpu means that your web site is executing code, perhaps a wrong loop on some not frequent code path.
The brute force way to identify what code is being executed, would be to add tracing to your solution by System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine("I am here") and then check the Azure Application Log.
Another way would be to attach the Visual Studio Debugger during high cpu and check what is being executed
The other way would be to take a dump or minidump from kudu site and analyze it with WinDbg:
1)What thread is conuming cpu:
!runaway
2) What is this thread doing:
!clrstack
hth,
Aldo

IIS7: Faulting application w3wp.exe, what is the root cause of these crashes?

Our Website is in .NET but with some old ASP and 32bits libraries too in it. It had been working fine for a while (2 years). But for the past month, we have seen the following error on our IIS7 server, which we have been unable to track down and fix:
"Faulting application w3wp.exe, version 7.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x47919413, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 6.0.6001.18215, time stamp 0x4995344f, exception code 0xe053534f, fault offset 0x0002f328, process id 0x%9, application start time 0x%10."
We are able to reproduce the error:
One of our .ASPX pages starts loading, executing code and queries (we have response.flush() all over the page to track where the code breaks), then it suddenly stops and we get the above error in IIS.
The page stops loading and, without the response.flush(), it's not redirecting to our error.aspx page (as configured in web.config)
The error does NOT happen all the time. Sometimes, it happens 3 times in a row, then it's working fine for 15 minutes non-stop with a proper redirection to error.aspx.
The error we get then is a classic: "Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted."
When the error occurs, the page hangs and all other session on the same computer from any browsers have hanging web pages as well (BTW, we only allow 1 worker process while we are testing). From other computers, the site loads fine.
I can recycle the Application Pool, kill w3wp.exe, restart IIS. Nothing will do. The only way to successfully load the page again is to Restart MS SQL which handles our Session States. I don't know why this is, but we guessed that the Session Cookies on the users browsers points to a thread which was not terminated properly (due to the above crash) and IIS is waiting for it to terminate to process more code (?). If someone can explain this better, that would be really helpful. Is there a timeout which we can set to "terminate" threads? Is it a MS SQL related issue?
I have also looked at the Private and Virtual Memory usages, because I think our code is not the most effective and I am certain we have remaining memory leaks. However, I saw the page crash even though both Private and Virtual Memories were still quite low (under 100MB each).
I have used Debug Diag and WinDbg as indicated here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tess/archive/2009/03/20/debugging-a-net-crash-with-rules-in-debug-diag.aspx, but we are not able to make windbg work, this is what we are trying to do at the moment.
If someone could help us or point us toward the right direction that would be really great, thank you.
"Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted" means the table is empty and you are attempting to do a MoveNext. So check for eof before you do any moves.
IIS is notorious for throwing kernel errors in w3wp.exe like this one. All your errors in session state are just symptoms of the crashed process. Multiple APP pools won't help much - they just spread the error around.
I''d wager it is SQL deadlocks due to your user environment changing. This will cause a 10-second lag as SQL tries to determine which query to kill off. One wins, one loses. The loser gets back a pointer to an unexpectedly empty table and you try a move and subsequent crash. You maybe could point your DB to an ODBC connection and turn on tracing, or figure out a way to get SQL to log it.
I had all the same symptoms as above in Perl. I was able to make a wrapper fn() to do all SQL queries and log all sql, + params and any errors to disk to track down the problem. It was deadlocks, then we were able to code in auto-retry, and eventually we recoded the query order and scanned columns to eliminate the deadlocks.
It's entirely possible one of your referenced/linked assemblies somewhere has randomly gone corrupt (it can happen) on disk. Can you try a replicate the problem on a new, clean machine with the same stats, fresh installs of the latest xyz drivers you're using?
I solved a mysterious problem that took me months to isolate this way. It seemed clean, new machines with the same specs and prerequired drivers would work just fine - only some older machines with the same specs were failing consistently. I ended up uninstalling everything (IIS, ASP.NET, .NET, database and client) and starting from scratch. The end cause when I isolated it was that the db client driver was corrupt on the older machines (and all the older machines were clones of each other, so I assume they were cloned after the corruption occured), and it seemed to be messing with the .NET memory space even when I wasn't calling it directly. I have yet to even reply to my "help me debug this monster" post with this answer because I doubted it would ever help anyone.
We started receiving this error after installing windows updates on a Windows Server 2008R2 machine. Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) installs some additional site bindings that caused issues for our setup.
We removed net.tcp, net.pipe, net.msmq, and msmq.formatname bindings from our website and no longer got the faulting application exception.
This is probably an edge case, but just in case someone is coming here and they are using MVCMailer , I was getting this same error due to the .SendAsync() method on the mailers.
I switched them all to .Send() and the crashing stopped.
See this SO answer for ways to use the mailer async and avoid the crash (allegedly, I did not personally implement it)

Sharepoint W3WP.EXE Process Consuming 100% CPU - Corrective Action?

We have a Windows Server 2003 web server, and on that server runs about 5-6 top level Sharepoint sites, with a different application pool for each one.
There is one W3WP process that keeps pegging 100% for most of the day (happened yesterday and today) and it's connected (found by doing "Cscript iisapp.vbs" at the command line and matching ProcessID) to a particular Sharepoint site...which is nearly unusable.
What kind of corrective action can I take? These are the following ideas I had
1) Stopping and restarting the Web Site in IIS - For some reason this didn't stop the offending W3WP process??? Any ideas why not?
2) Stopping and restarting the associated Application Pool.
3) Recycling the associated Application Pool.
Any of those sound like the right idea? If not what are some good things to try? I can't do an iisreset since I don't want to alter service to the other, much more heavily used, Sharepoint sites.
If I truly NEED to do some diagnostic work please point me in the right direction. I'm not the Sharepoint admin guy (he's out of town so I'm filling in even though I'm just a developer) but I'll do my best.
If you need any information just let me know and I'll look it up (slowly though, as that one process is pegging the entire machine).
It's not an IISReset that you need. You have a piece of code that is running amok with your memory. Most likely it's not actually a CPU problem but a paging problem. I've encountered this a few times with data structures in memory that grow too large to page in/out effectively and eventually the attempt to page data just begins consuming everything. The steps I would recommend are:
1) Go get the IIS Debug Diagnostics tools. And learn how to use them.
2) If possible, remove the session state from InProc to a state server or a sql server (since this requires serialization of all classes that go into session this may not be possible). This will help alleviate some process related memory issues.
3) Go to your application pool and adjust the number of worker processes upward. Remove Rapid fail protection (this will allow the site to continue serving pages even if rapid catastrophic errors occur).
The IIS debug diagnostics will record a LOT of data, but you can specify specific "catch" alerts that will detect hangs, excessive cpu usage etc. It will capture gigs of data, so be ready for a long wait when attempting to view the logs.
Turns out someone tried to install some features that went haywire.
So he wrote a stsadm script to uninstall those features
Processor was still pegging.
I restarted the IIS Application Pool for that IIS process, didn't fix it.
So then I restarted IIS for that site and that resolved the processor issue.

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