limiting memorylimit parameter to conserve system resources from w3wp
I am having performance issues with my server (wintows ENT 2003 64 bit) ...when w3wp hogs up memory 3 - 8.5 gb the server becomes unresponsive. This isn't acceptable since the server is hosting SQL Server 2005. No other applications use memory on the levels that w3wp does and cpu utilization is below 7%.
My (64 bit hardware) server has 16 processors and 16 GB of ram.
Microsoft suggests changing the default memorylimit value from 60 percent (I assume to something less than that)...but doesn't give details on how to determine what percentage it should be reduced to or what factors to take into consideration. I'm in a production environment and don't want to set it to 30% and have a million users flood the help desk complaining.
What is the most logical way of tuning to determine the right percentage of memory to make available to this process?
Thanks