w3wp not showing in remote process list

Questions about YourKit .NET Profiler
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oferbar
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Nov 24, 2009 2:42 pm

w3wp not showing in remote process list

Post by oferbar »

Hi,

I'm connecting to a remote Windows 2003 server from my XP PC to w3wp.exe process.
It was working fine for few days but then at some point w3wp disappeared from the list remote applications.

I do see 9 other applications there, but w3wp.exe is not in the list, even thought it is running on the remote server.

A closer look at the log showed that it got started with port 4651, when the other applications used ports 10001 - 10009.

Then I started shutting down some of the other processes and starting w3wp.exe.
After few tries I managed to see that it was now starting with port 10010 and I was able to see it in the list!

This looks like a bug and I'm wondering if this would be a problem to put YourKit profiler into the production servers. :?

Please advise.

Many thanks

Ofer Bar
Vladimir Kondratyev
Posts: 1624
Joined: Tue Aug 10, 2004 7:52 pm

Re: w3wp not showing in remote process list

Post by Vladimir Kondratyev »

It's not a bug. Profiler agent tries to find free port in "default" range 10001 - 10010 first. If all ports are in use, then some arbitrary free port is chosen. Scanner of remote application scans only default port range. In your case all default ports were in use, so some non-default port was used for w3wp.exe process. That's why scanner cannot detect w3wp.exe.

In the next version (or even minor 4.5.x bug-fix release) the default port range will be extended.

At workaround, I can offer to check used port number in profiler agent log file. Log is located in %USER_HOME%\.ynp\<pid>.log (where %USER_HOME% is a home directory of user which runs profiler application). If you know port number you can always use host:port in remote connection.
oferbar
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Nov 24, 2009 2:42 pm

Re: w3wp not showing in remote process list

Post by oferbar »

Thanks for the update.

It is a problem when there are more than 10 .NET applications running.

Why not making it a configuration parameter, so the user can extend the range?

Running the profiler locally via terminal server didn't work either since the responsiveness of the profiler was bad and I wasn't able to use it at all that way.

Thx
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