Greetings!

I have an ASP.NET app that scrapes data from a handful of external pages, parses the relevant bits and displays them in a table. Total data retrieved is 3-4MB and the resulting page is about 1MB. I am using synchronous WebRequest GetResponse for the retrieval, but the same problem existed using an asynchronous BeginGetResponse/EndGetResponse process. There is no database access, no session storage, no caching, but an in-memory list of about 100 objects (total 1MB of data), plus a good amount of AJAX (AjaxControlToolkit). This issue appears on the very first run of the app, even if I have restarted IIS.

The issue:

When I run the app on my dev computer, the maximum commit charge is about 1.5GB. The biggest user, measured by Task Manager's VM Size, is WebDev.WebServer.exe (600MB). The app runs perfectly.

When I run it on my rent-a-server (IIS 7.5, 1GB RAM), the maximum commit charge is over 3.8GB. The biggest user is w3wp.exe at 2.7GB. IIS grinds to a halt and spits out a timed-out error page. Given my limited server budget and the hope of having multiple simultaneous users, I'm kind of in a panic.

Is this normal? If I bump the server RAM up to 4GB, will that be enough? Will multiple users require even more memory? Could the culprit be AJAX or the list of objects?

Thanks for any insight you can provide.