Hello again.
Let us jump right into where we left off, shall we?
When logging on to the SharePoint server this morning I was greeted by a couple of error messages, stating that the IIS worker process had gone nutty. This was actually a source of joy as it meant that the error had been reproduced during the week I've been away from the server.
Looking at the Debug Diag tool lowered my spirits rapidly though as it had caught nothing in it's web. Not even the all-encompassing "All IIS related processes" filter had any info about the crashes.
I took a quick stab at the IISState tool I mentioned in my previous post but that didn't help me as it was more or less a command-line version of Debug Diagnostics. Instead I decided to read up on how to use Debug Diagnostics (I know, I should've done that to begin with but hey, I'm only human).
First off I noticed that there's a version 1.1 of Debug Diagnostics available so I grabbed that one and installed instead (you need to either uninstall the entire IIS Debug Toolkit or just Debug Diagnostics 1.0 in order to install version 1.1).
SearchWindowsServer.com has a nice roundup of links relating to this tool, one of them is a Microsoft KB article entitled How to use the Debug Diagnostics tool to troubleshoot an IIS process that stops unexpectedly, which sounds like something I need to read.
First of all I need to turn off health monitoring in IIS:
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Open the IIS MMC snap-in.
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Expand Application Pools.
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Right-click Application Pools, and then click Properties.
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Click the Recycling tab, and then click to clear all the Recycle worker process check boxes.
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Click the Performance tab, and then click to clear the Shutdown worker processes after being idle for (time in minutes) check box.
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Click the Health tab, click to clear the Enable rapid-fail protection and Enable pinging check boxes, and then click OK.
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Restart IIS. To do this, click Start, click Run, type iisreset, and then click OK.
Creating the actual crash rule is not explained in great detail though and the "Select the desired Target Type, and then click Next." line is not at all helpful as it's what type of target I'm unsure of. Unfortunately the aforementioned SearchWindowsServer.com article only tells me how to analyze an existing dump file.
So I'm going with the "A specific process" option and then selecting the w3wp.exe process. Microsoft tells me that after that all I have to do is the classic "Next, Next, Finish" manoeuvre and I gladly comply as I'm not quite sure what the advanced options do.
And yet again we wait for our unsuspecting prey to stumble into our cunning trap…
martinnr5