Our service tends to fall asleep during the nights on our client's server, and then have a hard time waking up. What seems to happen is that the process heap, which is sometimes several hundreds of MB, is moved to the swap file. This happens at night, when our service is not used, and others are scheduled to run (DB backups, AV scans etc). When this happens, after a few hours of inactivity the first call to the service takes up to a few minutes (consequent calls take seconds).

I'm quite certain it's an issue of virtual memory management, and I really hate the idea of forcing the OS to keep our service in the physical memory. I know doing that will hurt other processes on the server, and decrease the overall server throughput. Having that said, our clients just want our app to be responsive. They don't care if nightly jobs take longer.

I vaguely remember there's a way to force Windows to keep pages on the physical memory, but I really hate that idea. I'm leaning more towards some internal or external watchdog that will initiate higher-level functionalities (there is already some internal scheduler that does very little, and makes no difference). If there were a 3rd party tool that provided that kind of service is would have been just as good.

I'd love to hear any comments, recommendations and common solutions to this kind of problem. The service is written in VC2005 and runs on Windows servers.