SharePoint 2007 Central Admin w3wp.exe process consumin 99% CPU

Question

Hi,

I have been running an intranet using SharePoint 2007 for over a year and all has been working fine. However, after some time, I realized that the intranet portal was slow. Trying to access the Central Admin over another computer not the SharePoint server also became an issue. So I logged onto the real SharePoint Server and it took some ages to login and then was so slow even on the server unlike other times.

When I checked the Task Manager, I found out that w3wp.exe was consuming 99% of the CPU speed. When I restarted the Central Admin App Pool, everything came back to normal and all was running well but after a few minutes (15 or so), it again became slow.

I have checked the Event Logs and nothing conclusive was there to help me out. Anyone who has had this experience? or has any good resource? Please help. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Are you having any problems with OWSTIMER.EXE by any chance? Have you considered using Process Explorer to monitor CPU usage? Specifically, this would help you determine which Web Application was slowing you down provided that it is a single Web App. What do your logs say in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS folder?

I've had similar problems. Let me know more about your problem and I'll show you what I've found.

Answer 2

For those who might be interested and facing the same problem. I was using SharePoint 2007 RTM and when I upgraded it to SharePoint 2007 SP2. The problem was resolved. I am not sure what was causing it but SP2 has many performance improvements and possibly it had the fix.