What is normal Azure WaIISHost.exe Memory Usage?

Question

I have recently installed NewRelic server monitoring to our Azure web role. The role is a small instance. We are on OSv4 (Win 2012 R2) using 2.2 Service Runtime.

Looking at memory usage I notice that WallSHost.exe (which I understand to be Azure related) it reported as consuming 219Mb (down from a peak of 250Mb) via NewRelic. Is that a lot of memory for it? Can I reduce it? Just seemed like a lot to be taking up.

CPU usage seems to aperiodically spike at about 4% for it. However CPU isn't really an issue as my instance rarely goes above 50%

Answer 1

First off, why do you care how much memory a process is taking up? All of that memory will be paged out to disk, and assuming it isn't being paged back in regularly then all it does is take up page file size which is usually irrelevant.

The WaIISHost process runs your role entry point code (OnStart, Run, StatusCheck, Changing, etc) and is typically implemented in WebRole.cs. If you want to reduce the memory size of this process then you can reduce the amount of memory being loaded by your role entry point code.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kwill/archive/2011/05/05/windows-azure-role-architecture.aspx for more information about the WaIISHost.exe process and what it does.