I've been trying to solve this problem for some time now and have only been able to put band-aid style fixes on it, not really fixing the underlying problem. I'm hoping someone here might be able to help.
I work at a college and we use IIS 8 to manage our web server, on which we host over 80 websites, all of them WordPress based. Every other day when we get to the office it seems any one of our sites is down due to a massive amount of worker processes overloading IIS, and to fix this we go into IIS 8 and stop and restart the web server. Initially we thought this was a recycling issue and so we set the server to recycle requests periodically but eventually that became ineffective and didn't really address the underlying problem. We believe it may have something to do with our PHP configuration, but again, we cannot seem to narrow it down. We've searched and tried different things, yet nothing seems to solve the problem.
One potential solution I came across was a tutorial explaining how to limit CPU usage after a certain threshold is met but the weird problem here is that on our web server we have sixteen separate application pools and the CPU is never overloaded, even when the application pool in question is stuck. In other words, the other application pools continue working as they should, so I don't think this is the correct solution.
Does anyone have any idea why this happens or has anyone experienced and solved this before?