I am a technical specialist at GFI Software.

I have encountered your blog and decided to post since the problem may be related to one of our products – GFI MailEssentials.

Issues which result in high CPU utilization are very hard to troubleshoot. In your case, it is even more difficult, since inetinfo.exe loads other ‘sub-processes’ which include the various services included in IIS. IIS also supports having ‘plug-ins’ from other vendors loaded by inetinfo.exe, and therefore any issues occurring to these ‘plug-ins’ will be shown in inetinfo.exe process. These ‘plug-ins’ are better referred to as IIS Event Sinks.

GFI MailEssentials plugs into inetinfo.exe using IIS Event Sinks. Most probably Symantec’s MailSecurity makes use of similar technology to scan the emails incoming and outgoing emails before they are saved to the Exchange Information Store (although this would need to be confirmed by a Symantec tech).

Various other services included in Exchange 2000 also make use of IIS Event Sinks to make use of the services provided by IIS.

The first thing that I would check is that the file level Anti-Virus is not scanning any of the directories listed in http://kbase.gfi.com/showarticle.asp?id=KBID001824

One other troubleshooting step that can be tried in these cases would be to remove products which may be installed on the same machine. I am referring to the GFI and the Symantec software. Normally, this troubleshooting step is kept as a last resort, however, in urgent situations; the administrator may choose to perform this immediately. The un-install of GFI MailEssentials will not remove the configuration files, and a re-install of the product will not require you to re-configure the GFI MailEssentials once again.

As mentioned previously, most probably GFI MailEssentials and the Symantec software are using of the same technology to integrate with IIS. This may be the cause of conflicts, since both applications would be residing in the same memory space. Because of this, we normally do not recommend that GFI MailEssentials is installed with Symantec MailSecurity.

One tool that is commonly used to troubleshoot high CPU usage by inetinfo.exe is Process Explorer (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx). This tool, originally from SysInternals, provides all the functionality of Task Manager and much more. From the properties of a running process, you can view the threads that are loaded by the process. This will allow you to view the CPU being used by each thread. The name of the thread may indicate the cause of the high CPU usage.

I hope this information would be of help should you encounter the same problem again.

Nicholas Sciberras
nicks at gfi dot com
GFI Software – http://www.gfi.com
Messaging, Content Security & Network Security Software