How To Determine Which Application Is Running Within a COM+ or Transaction Server Package

For different reasons, but mainly for troubleshooting purposes, you may want to determine which application is running within Microsoft COM+ under Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) under Windows NT 4.0. All the applications are running in processes that have the same name (such as Dllhost.exe in Windows 2000 and Mtx.exe in Windows NT 4.0).

For example, Internet Information Server (IIS) uses these processes extensively when it is running Web sites or applications Out Of Process (or High Isolation). System administrators and developers need a way to determine which Web site or package is running inside every process.

Steps to Determine Which Application Is Running Under Every Process

In Windows NT 4.0

The applications under Microsoft Transaction Server run under the process called Mtx.exe. On a computer that has IIS installed, one Mtx.exe process is running the "system" package, and one Mtx.exe process is running for every Web site that is running Out of Process or for every package that you created.

To determine which package is running which process, you can use the Emcmd.exe or Tlist.exe utilities. You can obtain Emcmd.exe or Tlist.exe from the Windows debugging package, which is available from the following Microsoft Web site: NOTE: Version 3.5 of the debuggers has Emcmd.exe. The functionality of Emcmd.exe is rolled into Tlist.exe in versions 4.0 and later. After you obtain the above utilities, type the following commands at a command prompt to run the utilities: -or-

In Windows 2000

The applications under Microsoft COM+ run under the process called Dllhost.exe. On a computer that has IIS installed, one Dllhost.exe process is running the "system" package, and one Dllhost.exe process is running for every Web site that is running Out of Process or for every package that you created.

To determine which package is running which process on a Windows 2000-based computer, follow these steps:

1. On the Start menu, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Component Services.
2. Click to expand the Component Services, Computers, and My Computer nodes.
3. Click COM+ Applications.
4. On the View menu, click Status View.
5. The right pane displays the name of every package that is running. You can also see the Process ID of the corresponding Dllhost.exe in which the package is running.

For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: