Incase you didn't know- when you set your index server to use a dedicated server for crawling, SharePoint updates the host file on the index server with the IP address of the WFE. However, there are times where SharePoint adds an invalid host entry when there are 2 or more WFE's. Example - Say there have 2 WFE's - MOSSWFE01 & MOSSWFE02. Setting MOSSWFE02 as the dedicated crawler will cause SharePoint to update the host file in the index server. It adds an entry for MOSSWFE01 with the IP address ......
If you have multiple SharePoint web applications running on a server you would see multiple instances of w3wp.exe in TaskManager. When you need to monitor the performance of a SharePoint web app there is no way in TaskManager to figure out which w3wp process is the right one. Here's a quick way to identify the app pool associated with the running worker process: In the TaskManager menu select 'View' -> 'Select Columns' and check the 'PID (Process Identifier)' column Open command prompt window ......