IIS6 w3wc.exe memory usage.

Hi all,

I have a problem with our web servers and memory etc.

We have one application pool with a few websites in it and the w3wp.exe is
consuming about 800 mb memory now.
First we had a rule for recycling the application every x minutes or when
it's using more than 600 mb memory but when the recycle is activated the
w3wc.exe process hangs and the cpu usage goes to 100% until we execute an
iisreset.exe.

That's the reason why we disabled all the recycling options and configured
only one worker process for that application.
All the websites in the application pool use the same code, only they have a
different skin.
The website also uses xml/xsl transformations.

Is it normal for an application to push the w3wc.exe process to about 1GB???
If this is the case i really want to know how much memory dedicated hosting
companies need in their webservers :-)

We are storing some information in the application cache, but this is only
for the entire website and not per user... in plain text so the amount of
data would be no greater than 100KB at most.

The application is in classic ASP.
We walked thru the entire code and checked for correctly closing all sql
recordsets, email components etc etc etc...

What is the best approach to find out what is using so much memory and why
the recycle does not work correctly?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best regards

Floris van Haaster