Hi All: I have a server running 2003 Web Edition SP1 on a 2.4G Xeon with 2
gig ram and a hardware-mirrored, SATA 2-drive array (RAID 1).

The server is only used to send out emails to an email list of about 100K
addresses. The list is pulled out of a dB and CDO is used to create the
email and drop it in "InetPub/mailroot/pickup". Each email is about 10K.

The SMTP Service sends out the mail directly (no smarthost).

When I monitor the server while the CDO script is running, I see w3wp.exe
(the CDO script) and inetinfo.exe (the SMTP Service) both trundling along at
5-10% CPU each, with CDO writing about 6 files per second into the pickup
directory. No other processes are grabbing any CPU, and the activity graph
shows less than 20% CPU in use. The free memory doesn't change much either,
with about half a gig free at any given time.

If I stop the smtp service while the script is running, w3wp.exe rockets to
90% CPU and starts writing files into the pickup directory at a rate of 75
per second.

The problem I'm having is the script calling the CDO process takes many
hours to run, and times out entirely somtimes, and the entire list does not
get spooled into the pickup directory...but if I run the script with the
SMTP service stopped, all 100K emails will get written in 15 minutes.

My question is, what is preventing one or both of these processes from
utilizing more CPU, and is there any way for me permanently (or
programatically) set the priority of w3wp.exe higher?

TIA

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