A (rather major) memory leak has been found in SharePoint, caused by the failure of SPHttpApplication objects to be properly cleaned up - read all about it in Todd Carter's great post The Sharepoint Sasquatch Memory Leak

I have quickly whipped up a WSP that implements Todd's fix and thought I would attach it here for anyone else who might find it useful.  It simply deploys a DLL to the GAC which implements the classs he describes in his post.  I have done it as a WSP so that the DLL will be auto deployed to all web front-ends used by the web application it is deployed to.

The install process is as follows:

1) Install the wsp to the central admin solution store (using "stsadm -o addsolution -filename [filename]

2) From Central Admin, deploy the solution to your targeted web application.  This will deploy the SPHttpApplicationLeakFix DLL to the GAC on all the web front-ends for that web application.

3) Go onto all the web front-ends and change the global.asax file (found at: '\InetPub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\[Web App Dir Name]'). The two lines that need to be modifed are:


they should be changed to:


That's it - at this stage your sharepoint web application should still load and behave as normal, though hopefully its w3 worker process won't be consuming the huge levels of memory it was previously!

A zip containing the WSP and a small readme is attached to this article.

 

 NOTE: Now the update contains the wsp - apologies for the complete balls-up ;)