Please Help - Win2000 Server issue

anyone know what this error is and how to fix

[USCountytrader]

Please help, last night my web server went down. after a reboot it seemed to come back up. I went through my web log and to my surprise I found that during the time down I was getting a error code with a message after each page name that was trying to be accessed.

Out-of-process+ISAPI+extension+has+exceeded+crash+limit. 500

anyone know what this is and how I can stop it from happening again?

[Dreamquick]

Typically this error means exactly what it says; An external component has crashed too many times. Because its running out-of-process the effect will cascade from the site which caused it into all the other websites hosted on that instance of IIS.

I've seen this before on badly managed shared hosting, although I'd imagine it could also be caused by internal coders cutting corners when writing or using objects.

Assuming the machine is internal and fully managed by yourself;

I'd start by working out when the problem first occurred, then asking developers working on any site on that machine exactly what big stuff they've changed recently.

From there look at event logs - you never know you might find something useful which explains the phenomenon.

Next I'd to try to understand the sequence of events leading up to the first ISAPI error by looking at the site logs.

If all else fails try switching the process level on each site to isolated (increases stability but also server load) - that way when one site fails it wont take the rest down with it, from here you can take the trial and error approach to work out the site causing the problem.

Finally I'd start thinking about doing some serious memory leak tracing if all else failed, but this can be quite tricky if you have a high-traffic site and don't know where to start looking.

- Tony