Hi,

Smart-Thinker.com is running DNN 4.5.1, and receives about 500 users a day (ie. not high traffic).  I've had a lot of downtime lately and it seems to be taking up a lot of RAM (800 megs)and I can't figure out why. I noticed when I restarted the process that it immediately bloated and jumped from 64megs to 250meg in a few minutes. The site frequently hits some limit and recycles (or freezes with a "Server Unavailable" error.

Site Settings

• Page State Persistence - Page
• Module Caching Method - Memory
• Preformance Settings - Light Caching (was Moderate)
• Using Compression and whitespace filter

So my questions:

1. How can I tell what is using so much RAM?
2. What does the PurgeCache schedule task do? Does it regularly check the expiry date on cache items and purge them? I had mine on 12 hours - does this mean that items in the cache would last at least 12 hours? I've changed this down to 5 minutes - anyone know what the recommended value is?
3. I'm fairly sure this has just recently started happening, and I can't figure out why - any tips on RAM usage appreciated.
4. How much RAM should an average DNN 4.5.1 consume (assume 500 visitors a day - not massively high traffic) with optimised performance settings (ie. memory and not disk)

Entrepreneur

PokerDIY Tournament Manager - PokerDIY Tournament Manager<
PokerDIY Game Finder - Mobile Apps powered by DNN
PokerDIY - Connecting Poker Players

What performance counter are you checking for the Ram size? Frequently I see people just use the windows task manager and misinterpret the counter i.e. use the "mem usage" column. FYI, this is the working set size i.e. It is the amount of physical memory which is directly (currently) allocated to the process. It can be accessed without causing a page fault. This includes pages shared with other processes. The OS can release areas of this memory that are not being used upon request.

The correct counter to use is "VM Size" which is the total private virtual memory allocated to the process.

TO view this in task manager, click view->select columns, and check the 'virtual memory size' checkbox (or alternatively, if using perfmon add the "Process Private Bytes" counter )

Cathal

No new modules, but I now perform module caching in my UserProfile, so whenever it loads a profile it bungs it into the cache for x seconds (setable) and then all my modules check the cache first. Before the SQL service was going balistic as it hits 4 different sps whenever you call GetUser(). So now my SQL traffic has dropped drastically but RAM is a problem - I just am not convinced that it is this that is causing it.

What is interesting is that traffic does not seem to affect it. Yesterday there were 302 people online at PokerDIY at one point and before and after the RAM remained almost constant. What is also interesting is that Smart-Thinker uses roughly the same amount as PokerDIY - and has 80% less traffic. As soon as I kill the worker process the RAM dips by 300 meg or so, and then RAPIDLY climbs back up to near where it was (maybe 200) - this is why I don't think it is the traffic or profile stuff.

So my other main question which still needs answering - SHOULD the PurgeCache schedule task be run often (ie. every 5 min or so)- is this the process that checks the DNN cache and clears it if it has expired (sorry, sounds obvious) but need it confirmed. I it is, then it seems to me that I have to schedule this to run at least every 5 minutes, but I did a test and turned it off, let the RAM get high, and then turned it on (to cause it to run and clear the cache) and the RAM did not dip at all. The scheduled history always says it ran successfuly but 0 files were affected... what is the 0 files it is refering to? Is that if it uses disk caching?

TIA

Entrepreneur

PokerDIY Tournament Manager - PokerDIY Tournament Manager<
PokerDIY Game Finder - Mobile Apps powered by DNN
PokerDIY - Connecting Poker Players