profiling an ASP.Net web application taking loads of memory (>1.2GB) over time

Question

I have a web application which on first page load takes approximately 200MB of memory. In production, by a relatively short time (< 24hours), it grows up to sometimes 1.2GB of usage. Is there any way one can check what is taking so much memory, especially in production and not in development environment, where I cannot replicate exactly the scenario?

Also, the website is using extensively output caching and the HttpRuntime caching. Is there any way to know how much memory is being consumed? Is it possible to limit the HttpRuntime cache to a maximum amount of memory?

I'm relatively new to memory profiling - any help / guidelines would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

There are products and tools that can help you with this, some are free and some are not, take a look at these:

• SciTech .NET Memory Profiler - not free
• JetBrains dotTrace - not free
• RedGate ANTS Performance Profiler 8 - not free
• CLRProfiler - free