ASP / Windows 2008 Bugspot

Last post in 2006 heh... Not the most productiv blogger on the planet...

But now I've got something to write about, maybe.

How does one go about resolving an issue that appeared after a server upgrade? Here's the background story:

Before

• Windows 2000 Server with IIS 5.0
• ASP classic combined with a ASP.NET 2.0 website
• VB6 COM-components for some legacy business logic
• VB.NET assemblies for newer stuff, COM-flavoured for interroperability with ASP

After

• Windows 2008 Server (64bit) with IIS 7.0
• Same ASP and ASP.NET 2.0 website
• Same COM components
• Same VB.NET components

The new site is up and running apparently as it should, after learning IIS 7 and tweaking and much trial-and-error configurating.

Until... we start getting (in our eyes) strange errors. Basically two kinds, that may or may not be related.

1. WAS

We get, now and again, probably when we get the most hits on our system, WAS errors in the System error log, error IDs 5009 (A process serving application pool '%1' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '%2'. The process exit code was '0x%3'.) or 5011 (A process serving application pool '%1' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '%2'. The data field contains the error number.)

2. COM+ errors

Our COM objects are hosted by a number of COM+ applications to enable us to easily update our components and to allow them to run under different security contexts.

The components do what they should do, but after a while, with no obvious cause and effect, we get "Server can't create object" errors. Sometimes only the requested component fails to be created, other times all components within the same COM+ host fails.

The objects we are having problems with are the .NET ones which are COM-visible. They are hosted under COM+ but are not serviced components, in that they cannot get the ObjectContext or vote in transactions and the like.

What we've done so far.

We've installed and run DebugDiag on a number of COM+ packages and on the w3wp.exe process to get crash dumps. We get loads of those, with different exceptions codes; some are CLR related some aren't...

I've read (quite fast though) what I could find about WinDBG and loaded the different dump files but cannot find any proper clues as to what could be the matter....