w3wp.exe crashes every 5 minutes with error code 0xc0000374

w3wp.exe is the executable file of IIS worker process. It’s basically a Windows process that handles requests coming to your web server. Each worker process specifically serves for an application pool. Each application pool creates at least one instance of w3wp.exe. In some cases, w3wp.exe may crash with the error code 0xc0000374 in Event Viewer.

Here is the error message in Event Viewer:

Event ID 1000
Faulting application name: w3wp.exe
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll
Exception code: 0xc0000374

A symptom of this issue could be extremely slow performance of the application.

Related topic: How to enable Assembly Binding Logging debugging .NET applications?

What to do when w3wp.exe crashes with the exception code 0xc0000374

I would recommend getting running DebugDiag tool to collect crash dump. After collecting and analyzing the crash dump, I noticed that the root cause of the issue was a heap corruption.

If this is the issue in your case, here are a few things to try:

• One of the major cause of heap corruptions is that access violation error. An Antivirus software may cause this. I recommend temporarily disabling any antivirus software and monitoring the system
• Another major cause of heap corruptions is memory leaks. A logical issue in the application itself may cause memory leaks. It’s a good idea to do a health check in your application. If you have recently upgraded it, it is possible that the new version is causing this issue. It’s very common that third-party applications cause this issue
• Make sure to keep your Windows and third-party software up-to-date

DebugDiag logs provides a valuable information so you can narrow down the issue. However, a heap corruption may need a deeper level of debugging for further analysis. You can use WinDbg to troubleshoot heap corruption issues.

AppFabric Caching Service is crashing too? Check this post out.