How To Determine Which Application Pool W3WP.EXE Belongs To on an IIS 7 Web Server

This is a follow up to my earlier post that details how to track down which applications pools your w3wp.exe processes belong to on IIS 6 servers.  The command is new on Windows 2008 Server, so that calls for a new blog post.

So imagine you log into your web server, pull up task manager and you see multiple processes running named w3wp.exe.  You know this is a web server so you guess these processes may have something to do with the websites on the server, but you don’t have any idea which sites they belong to.  Being able to identify them is especially important if you are troubleshooting an issue and one of these guys is taking up all of your resources.

First you’ll need to open task manager and make sure the PID column is showing.  That way you can match up the processes with their application pools.  To do this go View—>Select Columns and check the box for PID. 

Here is where things get different on 2008 server.  Open a command prompt and navigate to C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv.  From there, run the command appcmd list wp.  You’ll get an output of all running worker processes along with the names of the application pools that they are running in.

If you’re trying to track down an issue, match the PID from the output of this command up to what you see in task manager.  From there you’ll be on your way to getting things resolved.