Classic ASP response times varying extremely

Question

I am working on a set of Classic ASP (VBScript) websites under different domains with 64bit Access (2013) database connection. Server is a shared Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8.5. The sites were not coded by me.

Everything seems to work fine for a time, but after several page calls (sometimes also at the first or only call to the site) the server does not respond for more than 20 to 30 seconds. This means: I can't call ANY page hosted on this server, even all other websites under different domains stop working for that time.

I am not sure, if plain HTML pages will respond, but it seems not. After such an issue everything is running fine again for various periods (up to 1 or 2 minutes), pages show up with normal response time, then this system hang repeats. And so on…

Finding the problem is extremely difficult, because all the sites on this shared hosting server could possibly cause this behaviour, it not necessarily seems to be triggered by my specific page call or subsequent calls, though it could be.

I am not sure, where to even look for the problem. I searched this forum and noticed some interesting answers, but not exactly to our problem. I tried Sysinternal's Process Monitor on a virtual server, where only one specific site is hosted and the same issues exists, but was not able to interpret most of the messages. I looked into event viewer log at this machine and noticed entries saying:

A trappable error (C0000005) occurred in an external object. The script cannot continue running.

But even if that sounds to be a possible reason, I am not sure where to look in the script or a log file, where I could find the trigger of all that. And on the shared host I don't even have the possibility to do that. On our local 'internal webserver' under Windows 10, where local copies of all the sites reside, I can. But I'm not sure, where to start my search.

Any help would be appreciated (and please don't needle me with proposals for switching to ASP.net or SQL - this is not possible at the moment).

Answer 1

I work with huge classic ASP application this error normally happens in a call for a Server.CreateObject('foo'). We have this kind of error here normally at the excel object when someone try to upload a very large .xls file. I would start mapping all the Server.CreateObject.