IIS 5 and PerlEx freeze on memory usage (stress testing)

I have a PerlEx application that occasionally consumes a big chunk of
memory. This is usually fine on my server. Watching task manager, I see
an occasional spike to 600 or 800 MB. When the operation is over, the
memory seems to be freed correctly since it always drops back to 300MB.

However, during stress testing, once in a while all three interpreters
hit the same operation at the same time and the memory consumption (as
shown by task manager) jumps over 900MB. At this point IIS freezes,
refusing to accept any more connections and the PerlEx process appears
to be hung as well since no CPU is being used and the memory consumption
never goes down again until I restart IIS.

This is IIS 5 on Windows XP Professional.

This is perl, v5.8.8 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
(with 33 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

Copyright 1987-2006, Larry Wall

Binary build 819 [267479] provided by ActiveState http://www.ActiveState.com
Built Aug 29 2006 12:42:41

The machine has 2GB of RAM. It is also running a SQL Server Express
instance with which the Perl app is communicating.
The memory consuming operation makes use of ImageMagick to process
images, if that makes a difference.

I am planning to put this application into production and can't afford
to have IIS hang from time to time. Of course I will be delivering on
IIS 6 with Windows 2003 server, so the situation might be different there.

Questions

1) could this happen on IIS 6 on Windows 2003 server?
2) is there some way of programming or configuring PerlEx to abort the
current request before everything hangs?
3) failing that, can IIS restart PerlEx automatically if there is a problem?

Thanks In advance


--

Bryan M. Kramer
Email: bryan.kramer@medeagroup.com

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