I don't know if this is the best place to ask this question; if anyone has 
an idea of another place I should ask, then please let me know.

At a customer site, we're seeing the virtual memory size of our COM+ 
application grow until it exceeds the maximum virtual memory a process can 
have. When we look at the dumps in windbg, it looks like MSXML is the 
culprit. There is a distinctive pattern of heap usage. An attempt to 
reproduce the problem in a development environment has not (yet) reproduced 
the out-of-virtual-memory problem, but _has_ reproduced the distinctive 
pattern of heap usage.

The heap usage pattern is that several heaps consist of a few "normal" heap 
segments, followed by a number of segments with only a single page 
committed. Each of these one-page-committed segments within a given heap has 
twice the reserved size as the one before it, yet has only a single page 
committed. Obviously, if this keeps up, virtual memory will eventually be 
full of one-page heap segments. In fact, this is what happens at our 
customer site.

We are using the normal, rental-threaded model with MSXML 4. We are using 
the DOM, with no SAX at all, and no XSL or XSD. I don't know if there's any 
XPATH, but there can't be much of it. My test program uses many threads to 
call our COM+ application, which in turn performs MSXML calls.

I've begun doing some memory allocation profiling with the AQTime 5 tool 
from Automated QA. It shows that all of the allocated segments with the 
committed vs. reserved discrepancy were allocated by a call to MSXML. These 
calls range from CreateInstance to setAttribute. I even saw one loadXml 
call.

We're in the process of narrowing this down. My test program now calls only 
one of our COM+ methods, which performs mostly XML work. I'll be working on 
a narrower test that only does specific MSXML calls. In the meantime, I was 
hoping that this pattern of memory allocation is familiar to someone.

Thanks for any help or suggestions,
John

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John Saunders | MVP - Windows Server System - Connected System Developer