Why does my 64-bit IIS app pool show 3 gigabytes more virtual memory than private memory?

Question

I have an ASP.Net application that I am running on 64-bit IIS 6 on Windows XP x64. When I open performance counters after one page hit of a trivial page, I see a Private Bytes of about 88 megs, but a Virtual Bytes of about 3 Gigs. When I try the same thing with a VERY trivial ASP.Net app, I get the same result. We see something similar on Windows Server 2003 in production -- there it is an issue because we recycle when the virtual memory consumed outgrows a limit. Before we make any changes to our recycling settings, we'd like to answer the following questions:

Why does the app pool grab such a large hunk of virtual memory? Is the amount of virtual memory headroom the app requests configurable?

Thanks! Brett

Answer 1

did you ever get answer to this as we have same issue. WP never goes above 100Mb on 32bit but on 64bit instantly grabs almost 3gb.