Using 3essentials's VD 100 plan. http://www.3essentials.com/virtual-servers.asp. Website members 2800, daily visits 1000. Using DNN 5.2.3. Lots of Schedule Event time outs. Especially Mail Connector from Active Modules (forum). I received the following email today. I don't know what it means. Any idea what I should do to fix this, besides getting an additional cpu. I honestly think something is wrong with the application. It's been happening for sometime now so I upgraded the plan but it still exists.

Any advice. Thanks.


Hello, I'm [NAME] the customer support manager of 3Essentials. I wanted to take a moment to make sure we've properly conveyed to you a cpu utilization condition we observe regularly on your system. I know you've already experienced periods where your site is unavailable or slow to respond and we have to recycle your application pool/worker process which we explain when you contact us. But I'm not sure we've done an adequate job of explaining to you just how chronic an issue you actually have.

Your server regularly runs 90-100% cpu utilization, and it's due to the website.com site. Each site has it's own application pool, and an application pool launches a unique worker process called w3wp.exe, and that is the host process for your code on that site. So in short, each site has it's own w3wp.exe where that site's code runs.

Attached, you'll find two images:

1) vserver18.taskmanager.png - this is a screen of your server desktop meant to illustrate 2 things:
- in the taskmanager on the right, you'll see all the processes running on the machine, and at the top, you'll see a w3wp.exe under user IWPD_9(website) running 99% cpu. On the left, you'll see the task manager view which shows a green chart illustrating total cpu utilization... notice it was fully utilzed, there was a drop to almost nothing, then some usage, then back to 100% cpu. During this period, your website site/worker process was running 100%cpu, bogging down your server. I killed the process... that caused it to drop down to almost none... the webserver will autmatically spin up a new w3wp.exe with the next request to the site, so that came up, and normal cpu usage occured for a while... then in a few minutes, it began maxing again, 100% cpu... and again, all due to the website site.

2) vserver18.cpu.png - this is a chart showing cpu utilization for the last 30 days for your server. Notice it is regularly high. the red areas are any time that the CPU utilization ran over 90%. When it's over 90%, my team is notified, and generally we log into your server and kill that website w3wp.exe, assuming that it's hung on something. But as you can see from this chart AND from the graph and my notes above, it only takes a few minutes for the condition to reoccur.

I have few points of feedback for you on this... You have a chronic high cpu condition... the cause? Either your application has some problems, or you simply need additional cpu on your server. If it's an application issue, it's outside of our scope of support services to diagnose this - we can simply give you the type of feedback we have here. If the app simply needs additional cpu, your vserver plan has a specific cpu allocation (1 cpu core), and can be expanded to include additional cpu cores, if you wish. If you would like pricing on the additional cpu core/capacity, please let us know, and I'll have our billing team provide you with that information.

Here are the scheduler errors I mentioned before.