Check status of a production ASP.NET process

Question

Hi all.

Is there a way to check what a asp.net process is doing in production environment? In Linux, one can run a strace on a process id and know exactly what the process is doing. Can one do something similar on a asp.net process? Googling around tells me that you need to create dump files and then analyze the problem there, but what if I just want to check on the current state of the process? (like cache size, longest running thread, # of the specific object... etc).

Any help would be great.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can see most of the information in your question by using PerfMon.

This provides an overview of ASP.Net monitoring with perfmon http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3xxk09t8(VS.71).aspx

To see managed memory usage check out .Net Garbage Collector (you can filter it down to the asp.net web site).

Check out the Process counters for more information about the IIS worker process.

Answer 2

As mentioned by JD, PerfMon may help you out. You should also check out the Windows Sysinternals tools. The two Sysinternal tools that will probably help you out the most are:

• Process Explorer
• Process Monitor