I have modx running on a Windows 2008 R2 webserver running IIS 7.5. Everything was running great for about 2 months then we started having issues. All of the modx related sites would be hung. To get the sites going again I have to stop, pause briefly, then restart the modx application pool. In monitoring task manager, I would notice that there would be many php-cgi.exe processes associated with the modx application pool before restarting the app pool. It is the only site that uses that application pool.
We have other php sites and they are unaffected by the issue but it hangs all of the modx sites (5 sites + management console). The issue started about the time some new development work started. Coincidentally we also applied Windows Patches a day or two before the issue started happening - but I could find no info on the patches that indicated any connection with the issue I am experiencing.
I myself have caused a crash by doing several small edits and saves in the modx console in a short period of time. We added 4 gb to the server and that helped a lot but today it hung multiple times. We added another 4 GB but 16GB seems like a lot of memory for a web server. (running on VMware) There are 31 iis sites (including FTP sites). 50-80 current connections is a normal load.
The site hangs most often when someone is in the modx management console but there are a few known occasions where I have checked all known developers and can find no one using it at the time the site crashed. I have a program that emails me when it can't ping the site - so I know relatively quickly when it does crash. I have tried setting recycle settings on the site but have not been able to hit upon a combination of settings that recycles when all these processes get spawned.
I found a similar post for someone running a newer version of php then us. But the suggestions in it were not helpful.http://forums.iis.net/t/1220426.aspx?Many+php+cgi+exe+processes My developer has indicated that later versions of php are notstable for modx on Windows so upgrading PHP versions doesn't appear to be an option for me.
PHP version: 5.4
Modx version: 2.2.15-pl (traditional)
IIS 7.5
Windows Server 2008R2 SP1