Processess running on a MOSS 2007 Beta 2 box

I configured a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Beta 2 (MOSS 2007) server and I was trying to better understand the processes that run on it. I used two computers, one running all WSS/MOSS services and the other running AD and SQL. The WSS/MOSS server is running Windows Server 2003 EE SP1 in a  Virtual Server guest with 1GB of RAM dedicated to it. The Virtual Server host is the one running AD and SQL for this farm (it is a Compaq NC6000, Turion x64, 2GB RAM) running Windows Server 2003 R2 EE x64, SQL Server 2005 EE x64 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 EE x64.

I configured the MOSS server with one Shared Services Provider, with all services are running on it, except the Document conversions launcher and the Document Conversions Load Balancer Service. When configuring all of this, I tried to stick to the defaults as much as possible. I used a single domain account  to run all services that I was allowed to configure. I put a site collection at the IIS root with a Search Center and also created an additional site collection for a team site under http://server/sites/name using self-service provisioning. I also hit the My Sites once to create one site there. 

The data here was collected using SysInternal’s Process Explorer (what a great acquisition, huh?) running on the guest OS. Before I looked at the numbers, I made sure to hit all main web sites (Central Admin, SSP Admin, SSP Web Service, Root Site, Team Site, My Site).  Please note that this was a simple test just to better understand MOSS. Specific numbers (like the number of processes of each type running and amount of memory used by them) will vary depending on server load, of course.  I provided the number just as a sample.

Info from the Performance Tab on Task Manager:

• Totals - Handles: 16,004 - Threads: 645 - Processes: 38
• Physical Memory (K) - Total: 1,048,040 - Available: 342,800 - System Cache: 220,548
• Kernel Memory (K) - Total: 31,372 - Paged: 19,020 - NonPaged: 12,292

Selected list of processes (all running under the MOSS service account, plus others that seemed specifically relevant to MOSS)

• wssadmin.exe, System, 11M
• wsstracing.exe, Local Service, 5M
• owstimer.exe, moss service, 65M
• mssearch.exe (MOSS Search), moss service, 20M
  • mssdmn.exe, moss service, 22M
• mssearch.exe (WSS Search), moss service, 10M
  • mssdmn.exe, moss service, 63M
  • mssdmn.exe, moss service, 53M
• inetinfo.exe, System, 9M
• w3wp.exe (Central Admin),moss service, 114M
• w3wp.exe (SSP Admin), moss service, 91M
• w3wp.exe (My Sites), moss service, 113M
• w3wp.exe (Team Sites), moss service, 157M
• w3wp.exe (SSP Web Services), moss service, 91M

Processes that run under the MOSS Service account

• OWSTIMER – Runs SharePoint-related tasks coming from the farm. Not important in single-server scenarios.
• MSSEARCH – Search processes (you will have two of those if you’re doing both WSS and MOSS search on the same server).
• MSSDMN – Protocol handler running in a Filter Daemon process that accesses a content source in its native format. Used by MSSEARCH for crawling.
• W3WP – IIS Worker process. There should be one of these for each application pool that is running.

Processes that run  as System

• INETINFO – IIS process that manages configuration, including starting/monitoring the W3WP processes.
• WSSADMIN – WSS Administration. I assume it executes tasks requested by the Timer, Central Admin and/or STSADM.

Processes that run as Local Service

• WSSTRACING – WSS Tracing. Logs events to the SharePoint diagnostic trace log file.

Please note that the description of the services are not "oficial" and they could be incomplete.