Okay, so I’ve got these two servers sitting here. Both of them are running Small Business Server 2003 (boo! hiss! I know).
There’s nothing hugely wrong with them as far as I can tell. They’re less than a year old. None of the extra SBS stuff is running on them (Exchange, etc).
And they run like absolute shit.
I’m talking that if I’m sitting here at the desktop and double-click on the IE icon I’m looking at MINUTES before the window opens. If the thing is locked and I do a C-A-D I’m looking at a good 10-15 seconds before the login screen pops up.
This is without any application software running!
I’ve tried various things and haven’t made any progress. These things are running something like dual Xeon 3.2s. And it seems that somehow the OS is crippling these things.
What processes are running in Task Manager? (Be sure to check “Show processes for all users”) When you open Task Manager how does the performance meter look? Peaking out? You can also see how much processor each process is using in Task Manager. You can Google processes to see what they are - if they’re spyware or viruses - and try killing some, or figure out why a particular process is hogging power.
What kind of hardware stats are we looking at besides the processor?
Sometimes servers come with weird defaults–had a Dell Poweredge once that came with the video card’s hardware acceleration turned all the way off. Couldn’t figure out why the gui was so damn pokey for a while…
Okay, even with our application software running our CPU usage never passes 18% and is generally sticking around 10%. Memory is running at about 733MB with a physical memory of 518K available out of a total of 1GB.
I’m trying to get Dell’s site to go by the service tag and tell me everything about the unit, but they’re Poweredge 1800. Dell’s site is being a pain, it seems.
I would try running knoppix or something just to verify that it is a software issue (which it probably is) and if it is, then wipe the machines, reinstall Windows and upgrade it and all hardware drivers before installing any applications.
Something I have noticed, for what it’s worth, is it seems to happen typically when there’s something involving disk activity. For example, if I open a file…massive delay. But when I’m done with that file and exit something…instant. Unless it’s something that insists on cleaning up DBs or something, in which case the delay is forever.
Most CD burning software packages have built-in utilities to test drive transfer rate - perhaps test that.
Are the disks IDE? Check whether DMA is turned on or not. If Windows detects an error on disk read/write, it’ll lower the DMA rate until you’re stuck on PIO mode. I’ve had a disk that got 10+ times faster after I started checking why my games were getting pokey.
There are copy protection utilities for audio CDs and games that stick themselves (StarForce being one I recently found on my machine). It might be possible for this to affect your HD too.
Misconfigured spyware or AV programs are a possibility too.
