[jboby]

Ok. Here's the deal: I'm a contractor working for a company that uses (still uses) a VB6 application for all of their processing while I am in the process of developing a .Net solution.

Unfortunately, this is a rather large organization and the VB6 app is their bread and butter (for now).

Here's the problem: erratically (sometimes this happens several times a day ... sometimes it doesn't happen for days on end .. it happens when the office is at full capacity .. it also happens when only one person is in the office over the weekend .. it happens to all different types of users -- from admin to data entry people .. and it does not happen with any predictable consistency at all; there is nothing we can do to force it to happen, so actually being able to watch it happen is a rare event.), the application starts to consume vast resources which, when left unchecked, bring the server to its knees. I have written a small script which watches resource utilization for the dllhost.exe even that hosts this ComPackage -- when resource utilization appears to be ramping beyond normal utilization (typically, the working set hovers around 15M and 20M) the dllhost.exe container is killed and re-stared. This kills all sessions at my client's workstations, but prevents the server from going into seizure.

The application is a client server application built in VB6. The Server component lives on the server and is served up by Component Services.

When the application does decide to crash, the msvcrt.dll!endthreadex process context switching delta goes through the roof.

I'm not sure where to go from here to determine if the problem is within the server.dll for the application (which I doubt), or associated with the SQL server connection (a remote SQL server instance) .. or whether the problem is with a piece of hardware .. networking issue .. another piece of software? I'm lost.

Please help.
Thanks in advance.

Attached Files

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