Hi Wes,

Thank you so much for coming back to me.  I will go and change the Application pools to .net 4 and ensure that it is set to use integrated security.

Which emulation mode should I be using, 32 or 64 bit? which is recommended.

I got my server settings from http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/D... so are we 100% that this should be run in .net 4.0? Everything I have read online has recomended 3.51 and when I open a fress DNN install in visual studio it says its set to run in 3.51 but it gives me the opportunity to upgrade the code to .net 4.0

I take it from your post that DNN hasn't encountered this problem at all?  You are not able to replicate it?

Solved - I installed .net 4.5, set the application pool to .net 4, set Enable 32 bit applications to true and restarted the server and seems to be much much better now.

Seems to stay at around 120K for the blank site, goes up by about 200 rather than 10K per hit and recycles automatically often enough to keep memory below 160k.

Thank you for all the help and suggestions. Its amazing how quickly we can put together applications using your framework so excited to move our first project into testing :)

Hamish,

You need to understand a bit more about how asp.net operates ... you DONT want the asp.net application pool constantly recycling.

This will introduce huge amounts of performance issues on a live site !! !! !!

The application pool is only created one for all access to the site - if you keep recycling the pool all the time - then every time anyone accesses your site you will get a large processing hit and delay as the server needs to restart the application pool - instantiate all resources and recompile dynamic code sections and load core data into caches - this can lead to delays of up to 10 seconds for a first page load and large processing spikes on the cpu and hard drives.

Give the application pool as much space as it needs and you will have a very fast and responsive web site - if you keep recycling the application pool you will have a slow and unresponsive first page visit for all users - and a server that feels slugish.  And more to this point - if you keep recycling the pool while users are accessing the site - the same thing will start happening for EVERY page the try to visit - since if the application pool was recycled between page views - then the same thing will need to happen all over again before the users is delivered their next page.

On most of our hostings the application pool rarely ever recycles - in fact we go to great lengths using Keep Alive tools to ensure the opposite of what you are doing - and that is keeping the application pool alive ALL THE TIME.

Westa