IIS 7 Application Pools using a different amount of memory on multiple servers behind a load balancer

Posted by Jim March on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Jim March
Published on 2012-11-26T16:49:53Z Indexed on 2012/11/26 17:06 UTC
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We have 6 servers in a web farm behind an F5. There are approximately 25 AppPools on each of these servers.

On servers 1 - 5 the apppools are consuming approx 500MB Private Bytes, and 5GB Virtual Bytes. On server 6 the apppools are consuming approx 800MB Private Bytes, and 8GB Virtual Bytes.

I can not seem to figure out why we have this difference. The code is the exact same on each box. We replicate the apphost.config between the boxes, so the Appplication Configs are identical.

The only difference seems to be that this box consumes more RAM, and in turn ends up using a lot more CPU. During Black Friday we observed the CPU on server 6 spiking to 100% and noticed that the % Memory Commit was also near 100%, while the rest of the farm was at closer to 50% utilization. Pulling the 6th server from the load balancer dropped CPU/Memory on the 6th server back to normal, and did not cause a noticeable strain on the other servers.

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