Okay, I’ve got a pair of Dell Poweredge 1800 units. Decent machines. RAID5 arrays. Dual hyperthreading processors. SBS2003 with none of the extra stuff. No domain, none of the extra software.
The processors on these things never go past 20%, and the memory usage is always pretty low.
The machines run along just fine…sort of. Do whatever you want, and it’ll happen instantly. Unless the disks are being accessed. If the disks are being accessed (say, by the surveillance recording program for which these machines exist) you will be lucky if Task Manager or Internet Explorer will load in less than three or four minutes.
In all that time, the CPU doesn’t spike. The memory doesn’t spike. That machine isn’t really recording that much data - maybe 80-90 35Kb images per second. I’ve taken mid-level machines that were nowhere near as powerful as these things and gotten machines that actually, you know, WORK.
Anyone have any brilliant suggestions? It has got to be related to the disks (or more likely the controller), right?
-Joe