To debug a SharePoint site (or, asp.net) hosted in IIS, we need to attach the corresponding w3wp to Visual Studio. However, if you have multiple sites running in your IIS, you’ll find multiple w3wp processes [Worker Process] running in your task manager. The problem is that you can never tell to which site, a given w3wp process is associated with merely looking at the task manager.Alternatively, we can attach all the process to visual studio but it will only make it slower. To identify the actual process, we can simply run a command at the command prompt or we can directly get the info from the IIS Manager.
Command Prompt
Navigate to the path:
C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\
For IIS 6
Run the command,
iisapp.vbs
For IIS 7
Run the command,
appcmd list wp
IIS Manager
- Go to run and type, inetmgr and press enter.
- In the IIS Manager, select the server name in the left panel.
- Then open “Worker Processes” from the main screen, under the IIS section.
- You can see that the unique Process ID has been mentioned against each app pool entry.
NOTE: Application pools by default (even in IIS 6) will only spawn a worker process (w3wp.exe) on the first request to a web-application hosted by that particular pool. The w3wp.exe instance will then remain alive for another 20 minutes (assuming default settings) and if no other requests for that application pool come in, IIS will shut the w3wp.exe down – remark that the pool is still active. The setting that controls this is the Idle Timeout in both IIS 6 and 7.
Piyush K Singh 