I'm hoping someone out there may have some guidance in tracking down a CPU Utilization problem I'm having.

I'm running on Win2k3 with DNN4.4.1 and SQL Server 2000... dual CPU with 4gb RAM.   This is the only website configured on the server... though previously it was running 3.1.2 I think it was for over 1 year with no performance related issues.

No however, the w3wp.exe process will bump the total CPU to exactly 50% minimum (one CPU worth) after a few hours of running my site.  I have perhaps 10k to 15k page views a day... so not a real high traffic site for the horsepower I have.... (it was running fine with 10k/day for a year with minimal CPU usage considering).

If I processkill the w3wp service, it starts right back up at 50% and sucks up it's previous memory usage in about 10 seconds.   If I IISReset, it will be back to "normal" for a few hours... until it all of a sudden hits 50% again...

Any ideas how to track this issue down?  Memory leak? Ok.. which module?  Server config issue?  Using mostly defaults...   DNN Config issue?  Well, I turned compression on... 

Any tools of the trade out there I should consider?

Thanks very much!

Ah!  I went into the DotNetNuke.Services.Search.SearchEngineScheduler, DOTNETNUKE

history and found many errors of the following: 

EXCEPTION: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

If I get an Exception, it happens within about 60 to 62 milliseconds....    if the job actually completes the re-indexing of content, it may take 2400 to 2500 milliseconds.

Is there anything I can do here to help this?   Thanks for the lead... this may be it if the w3wp.exe is still waiting for somethign when in fact it's already timed out? 

This issue has definitely been isolated to the DotNetNuke.Services.Search.SearchEngineScheduler

Without the schedule running, my CPU utilization has been stable.   If I run the schedule, it goes right back to 100% utilization.

In checking SQL Server connections, it accepts the connection, runs and completes, usually in only 30ms, but then DNN doesn't seem to get the response back or something else happens and it goes right to 100%.

What exactly does this SearchEngineScheduler do?