[eben khaldoun]

hello guys,
we have a file server (a server that it is containing the Data of the users in the company)
the users are connecting remotly to a terminal server, and from the terminal server they are using their data from the file server (sun system)
the system is becoming too slow and it is hanging too much.
even if you work on the file server itself, without any network connection, it will keep working about 3 minutes and hang about 3 minutes all the time.
this situation is keeping happened every 1 month, approximatly (the date is not fixed). every one month we have the file server down for 4 days, and then the server will continue working normally without any problems for the rest of the month

we have the norton antivirus coporation version. we are checking the server using the norton, but there is nothing.

maybe it is a sympthom of a virus maybe not. as i said, the date of damaging the server is not fixed.

do you have any advice for that??????????????????????

[homemade-jam]

Is there some weird process in the background that slowly takes up more and more memory over time due to some bug error?

[eben khaldoun]

there is nothing on the background. there is no weird applications or programs.
it is simply a server with windows server 2003, containing the data of the users.
even the process of the CPU or the RAM is normall, it will go maximum to 15% usage.

and there is nothing giving error.

[homemade-jam]

Most likely hardware or drivers then

[DeCompile]

What do your performance counters say?

Are your logical disks taking a long time to find the data? Is there a lot of data in the queue?

Your performance counters are your primary source of finding the bottleneck as every server is different, and they all behave differently.

[eben khaldoun]

"Your performance counters are your primary source of finding the bottleneck as every server is different, and they all behave differently."

PERFORMANCE COUNTERS it is a good idea.
can you please clarify a little bit more??
how to check the PERFORMANCE COUNTERS and where???

thank you for your concerne

[DeCompile]

Firstly, what operating system are you running?

Windows Server ?

*Nix based ?

They all contain the relevant information, just different names and places.

[no2pencil]

DeCompile, on 10 Sep, 2008 - 04:12 AM, said:

Firstly, what operating system are you running?

He already mentioned it's a Sun Server running Windows Server 2003.

Under the task manager do you see anything using up abnormal amounts of system resources? When was the thing last booted & cleaned up?

[DeCompile]

My bad.

Check out under 'Administrative Tools' -> Performance monitor.

[eben khaldoun]

hello no2pencil, thank you for your help, because it is a serious problem

the server was restarted yesterday and before and before.
but what do you mean by cleaned up???

i did not notice anything weird in the task manager.

even the event viewer is not mentioning anything usefull.
there are warnings and errors, but without any result. it will not guide you anywhere.

let me give you an example:
our users are using the outlook (of course we have an exchange server) and the outlook is connected to the PST files on the file server.
sometime they open the outlook, a message will appear: cannot read the pst file the connection to the server was lost.
if the user log off and log on again, it will open normally.

i hope i am explaining well

thank you

[no2pencil]

How large are these PST files? You may want to have the PST files local, because w/ Outlook I believe the PST file is open like a file stream constantly updating. You run enough of these over a 10/100 lan & you will choke the hell out of your network. If a few of these PST files get to be 500mb or a GB in size, think of the bandwidth only a few users will be using!

In my experience it is best to have the PST files local & then perform weekly backups over the weekend while they are gone. That way you get the mandatory speed with some reliability (backups). It's not very likely that you'll need to recover one of these on the spot (therefor requiring live backups over the network), however you will always require a constant flow of data at maximum performance.

Hopefully this helps solve your problem!

[DeCompile]

Depending on your situation.

We run on a domain with roaming profiles and have the PST files redirected to the file server and have not had a problem. This is with people with over 2 gig in their PST file.

It really depends on how the system has been set up.

Could you advise more on the hardware configuration of this machine as apart from what has been offered there aren't too many other 'generic' solutions.

[no2pencil]

DeCompile, on 26 Sep, 2008 - 07:25 PM, said:

This is with people with over 2 gig in their PST file.

Wow, that's amazing. I've only experienced trouble w/ that style setup.

[DeCompile]

We're a little spoilt though. We've got an entire 10Gb fibre optic connection for every computer.

So 2Gb isn't that much data.