- Home ›
- Articles ›
- W3Proxy.exe high memory usage on ISA 2000 and SBS 2003
W3Proxy.exe high memory usage on ISA 2000 and SBS 2003
Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition comes bundled with ISA 2000 firewall/proxy. It is well know that ISA 2000 can cause excessive or high memory usage in its default configuration. This can be further compounded on SBS 2003 machines which run Active Directory, Exchange and SQL 2000 all on the same box.
I came across this problem recently when a SBS 2003 machine was running sluggishly. The SBS server had 3GB of RAM so it should be running quite smoothly; however inspecting the memory situation and running processes I discovered that W3Proxy.exe (ISA 2000 proxy) was using almost 900MB of RAM.
ISA 2000 out of the box and in its default configuration is setup to use 50% or available memory for caching. This is particularly problematic on machines with more memory because the more memory you have the more ISA gobbles up.
Memory usage before optimizing ISA cache setting:
1. Open ISA Management console
2. Right click on Cache Configuration and select Properties, Click Advanced tab
As you can see the default setting for Percentage of free memory to use for caching is set to 50%. This will allow ISA W3Proxy.exe to use 50% of available free memory, making your system crawl.
If you don't have many users who rely on the caching ability or you're more interested on the speed of your server rather than W3Proxy performance then you can safely change the memory setting to 5%.
Memory usage after applying 5% setting:
We noticed a huge improvement in general server responsiveness after the change without any noticeable degradation in proxy cache performance.
[Permalink] - Updated: Thursday, October 30, 2008