One of my servers is a Windows 2007 Server Standard, 32-bit with 4 GB of RAM. I have about 60-70 websites running on the server. Most of the websites have a SQL DB. Those with a SQL DB also are using Sitefinity's CMS 3.7 (so .net 2.0). I have tons of disk space. SQL server is running about 200-200 MB of memory...which I can live with. What I am having a hard time with is with all the common services, that this server within moments of restarting iis (iisreset) to purge the memory usage jumps from about 25-32% memory usage to 85-87% usage once these sites get warmed up. I have the sites grouped with app pools like all home health agencies, home rehab, etc. uses a medical app pool, attorneys use their own, oil and gas businesses use their own, etc. So I don't have unique app pools for each website but about 10-15 app pools. For the sites that don't hardly run, I don't see those pools used. But there are about 5 app pools (because the sites are visited often) I see the w3wp.exe image names. These sites are just db-driven, mostly text with a few images...so no streaming audio/video, flash, or high end anything. Before I noticed this, I began to notice some lag on the server. When it got to become really noticeable for me to investigate that is when I saw that I was around 85% physical memory. My page file is 2.5 times the RAM. I understand that those services/app pools run while a site is running and stays there so the site loads faster for the next person, but I am at the point of an automated batch file restarting IIS every 6 hours just to keep the websites running all day (if not, I noticed I was getting error messages of pages not loading because basically there was hardly any memory on the server to serve it).
Besides upgrading the RAM, what can I do to get more or tweak to make the sites run fast (or faster) with the same RAM? I am trying to avoid migrating things to a faster server because it would take days to migrate and some sites may experience issues during the move. Allow me to mention one more thing, I don't want it to cost much because the price to upgrade from this server to another server with twice the ram and processor would be around $50/mo. more. I have oodles of bandwidth and server disk space on the current server.