Windows SBS 2003 help

[kbsantosh1]

Hello Everybody,

I have a Windows SBS 2003, which is primarily used as a file server. Shared folders with plain ascii text files are accessed by users to read and write through a DOS 16 bit application. Users also use the shared folder to view "images" in the DOS application.

My challenge is

(a) The Page/Sec is peaking to 100% every 10 seconds and the result is erratic performance - delays experienced by user.

(B) The disk queue also peaks to 70-100% once in 10 seconds.

The server is a Dell PowerEdge 2800 with 4 GB RAM and a Raid 5 System. Approx 30-50 users connect to the Server at a time. The primary is a PDC for the domain. All possible services are stopped on this server and DNS, WINS etc is load balanced to a secondary server.

Any help to improve the performance of the server will be sincerely appreciated. Please let me know if I can offer any more stats to diagonize this further.

Thanks.

- Santy Balan

san.rely@gmail.com

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Here are few statistics of the Server :-

TOtal Memory : 4 GIG

Raid 5

C Drive : 12 GB {paging file : 2 - 2 GB}

D Drve : 240 GB {paging file : 8 - 20 GB}

Acting as File Server for shared folders. Accessed by 30-50 users to read/write text files into the shared fodler.

Pages per sec... peaks to 100% about every 10 seconds

Average Disk Queue peaks to 70-80% about every 10 seconds

Process Stats

% of User Time = 5-10%

% of Processor Time = 100%

% of Privileged Time = 100%

Memory

Available Bytes = 100%

Free System Page Table Entries = 100%

Commit Limit = 100%

Page Reads = Spikes in 10 sec upto 100%

Page writes < 5%

Transition faults/sec = spikes in 10 sec upto 100%

Physical Disk

Average Disk Queue = Spikes in 10 sec upto 100%

Paging File

% of paying file usage < 1 % constant

Commit Charge (K)

Total : 2490632

Limit : 14409488

Peak : 2544516

Physical Memory (K)

Total : 4193360

Available : 1663572

System Cache : 1854808

Kernel Memory (K)

Total : 124652

Paged : 73828

NonPaged : 50824

Totals :

Handles : 25707

Threads : 1090

Processes : 74

CPU Usage = 2%

Commit Charge : 2431M/14071M

PF Usage : 2.37 GB

[cluberti]

Your stats lead me to believe that the spike is happening in kernel processor time (privileged), and you're seeing lots of paging operations per second which would indicate file cache access. Have you removed/disabled A/V on both the client?

[nmX.Memnoch]

The drives are configured as one large RAID5 array? Dell has a habit of doing this unless you specify otherwise. I generally use two drives in RAID1 for the OS and seperate the data onto another RAID5 array. Another thing I usually do is get the split backplane option so the OS drives are on one channel of the controller, while the data files are on another channel.

Still, 30-50 users shouldn't be causing this kind of performance. Do you have the RAID controller configured for Direct I/O or Cached I/O?

cluberti also brings up a good point about AV software.