Question about order.cgi processes running in Task Manager

[royhink]

We are tracking down some performance issues with another software program, a CRM, that is also running on the same WIN2003/IIS box that we have 3 ShopSite stores running.

The ShopSite stores are running fine.

But I noted that there are 15 'order.cgi' processes running in Task Manager. Is it correct to assume that order.cgi runs with every active shopping cart, and that they stop when the transaction is either complete or abandoned?

Also, most are running at 3M memory usage, but there is one running at 62M - 75M. What effects the memory usage?

Thanks

[Jim]

Yes, each shopper has an instance of order.cgi running while they are shopping. Windows servers typically have a low run time for processes of 1 to 5 minutes so if not action is performed during that length of time by the shopper the process will terminate.

A typical order.cgi shouldn't require much more than 3 meg of memory. the one that is using 60+ meg is probably web crawling spider (indexing your site like google or yahoo etc) that is hitting your site and constantly adding item to the cart for each order button that it finds. As it adds products the size of the shopping cart file will grow and so will the process memory usage.

You should have a robots.txt file on your server that prohibits indexing spiders from following any links that accesses the sc directory (add to cart, view cart, registration, search, etc). Most indexing companies honor such entries but some may not.