[surfguru]

Hi there,

Well I thought I might see if some combined wisdom can help solve my problem.

Basically the network grinds to a halt for periods or 3-5 seconds (sometimes 15) causing everyones machine to lock etc

The cause as far as I can tell is due to the fileserver. It is a primary DC and a Windows 2003 box. 130GB C drive with about 30GB free. Plenty of RAM and processor power etc.

We run terminal services here, although I don't think that has too much bearing on the issue as it happens to the few local users also.

Users within there TS profile have multiple drives mapped, H for personal, I for common etc etc.

How do I know its the file server ... If I even do a search or file permissioning change on the box it locks up the users. Basically I see it as there network mappings timeout/freeze and therefore the session freezes as a result. When frozen the processor is chilled and the RAM usage is low but the HDD's lights are going like christmas tree lights on speed.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated as I am getting to the desperate stage at the moment... This is really killing the network.

I am planning to get a new box to run as the file server but that is a while and if it can be avoided taht would be great, although I do admit I would love to get the file serving off the DC

Cheers,

David

[MCSE1982]

well im not sure of the size of your domain/network. but its seems that your hogging up the resources on this one server, can you bring up a second domain controler and split up some of the roles? I would guess your HDD is maxing out because of all the disk access request, your ram/cpu can probably keep up with all of them but since HDD access is a slower its becomming your bottle neck I think. I would keep one server primary as a file server and bring up a 2nd, and make it a Domain controler, and a global catalog to handle all your other task?

[MCSE1982]

another maintence step you can do during after hours, is back up the server, and run check disk, along with a defrag, you can also manually arange all the files to one volume/partition, to keep the head from moving as much on the HDD, if possible.

[surfguru]

Hey there, I am glad that you agree that the server is getting swamped ... that was my theory as well helps me think that getting this new file server will certainly be a step in the right direction.

I will get that scan and defrag going this weekend for sure, hopefully that will help it make it through to new server time

[bwebber]

Hi there.

Just an opinion.

If you are going to be buying a server specific for files, instead of putting a huge drive in there rather split it into a few smaller drives, that should increase performance as well. The more drives the more spindles the faster the access to the data.

If you have major traffic flowing through that one pc, you might want to think about sticking in two network cards to do a bit of load balancing.

[surfguru]

thanks bwebber, i'll do just that !!

[biggles77]

Have you thought about running Performance Monitor on your "sluggish" server and seeing what the actual problem might be?

[Dumber]

I'll go with biggles.
Go start monitoring first.. what's slow? file access? browsing? maybe you're network slow.. Maybe there is a high cpu load? maybe the virusscanner breaks into it. maybe it's DNS?

There are a lot of options, and without monitoring it's impossible to see what's wrong.. so i can only go guessing.