Network Lock Up

[Andy2789]

This may be a stupid question, but I have gone completely blank! We have just built our new network running Server 2016, which is running quickly (and up to now with no problem). However, when students all try and open the same document from a share at the same time. It completely freezes the server up, network traffic doesn't spike, nor does processing.... The server appears happy as can be. But on client PC's everything stops, I am sure I remember it has something to do with I/O settings, as I have experienced this before. However for the life of me, I can't remember how to fix it. The server is coping fine with 200 users pulling profiles, appdata, home folders and shares without missing a beat. But when they are all asked to open the same resource it locks up, its happened now twice in two days in the same member of staffs lesson.

 

Prior to these two occasions, students have access resources from the shares with no problem. So I am at a bit of a loss, but I do remember this happening at my previous school and having to make some minor tweaks and all was well!

[woodham]

is it the same file each time? can you get them to try a different file?

[Davit2005]

What type of file is this, is it Word doc, PDF, Excel spreadsheet and is it a read-only copy?

[disk]

Physical or virtual server(s)?

[Andy2789]

Sorry for delay, I have been doing investigation. Its PowerPoint mainly but Word has been spotted as well. It happen on PDF files, or any other program files. It’s when Students try and open a resource all at once on a student read only drive. We have also tried staggering opening it, it can be 5 students or 30 the effect is the same.

 

The files are stored on a virtual server, along with all student files (personal and profiles). Which with exception of this issue handled and processes data at a fast speed

Edited October 1, 2018 by Andy2789

[ITGuyWestMidlands]

Do you have any shortcuts in those folders that link to files or folders that no longer exist or that they cannot access

[FishCustard]

Do you have NTFS compression enabled on the server drives?

 

Also, a Process Monitor trace on a client PC and the server during an incident would help greatly.

[pete]

Are you using dedupe on the fileserver?

Are the students copying the document to their home directories so they have a copy to work on?

[Andy2789]

No, we aren't using NTFS compression on the server. When the crash happens, the Network traffic to the server drops to kb. It's normally running Mbps on the S and R constantly, again nothing on client or server spikes. Word or Powerpoint just opens the splash screen saying 'Opening X Document' and it hangs there. For everyone else on the network, any drives or anything on that server becomes completely unresponsive. Clients not opening the file, say the server is no longer available, which reflects in the drop in network traffic. In regards to students saving a copy, they are all opening a read only copy and then they save as a copy to their own area if they are editing it. In some cases they are literally just opening it, and not even editing the file.

 

I do wonder about something in the content of certain files, because it's only happened 4 times now. With students accessing shared data on the drives with no problem any other time, and I am sure classes open files on mass in other lessons. But I don't understand how a file could stop network traffic to the server. It behaves almost like a loopback, really odd!

[Jawloms]

I had speed issues for a while and it was simply the driver for the disks. I know it's a basic and obvious thing, but it is very easily missed and regularly assumed "it won't be that". Always worth checking it's got the latest manufacturer's driver and not some creaky Microsoft.

[Andy2789]

@Jawloms Is that the driver on the Virtual Disk (as Virtual Server) or Physical disk?

[Jawloms]

Physical

[PyROm]

I remember having something similar before a long time ago with a file on read only drive. Not a very good solution but we found that getting them to copy the file to their home drives and then opening it solved the issue.

[computer_expert]

Do you have eset antivirus installed on the server? If you do, is it the server product (File security) or the workstation product (endpoint AV). I only ask as there was a post recently where there were similar symptoms being caused by the workstation version running on a server (and was resolved by removing the workstation version & installing the server version).

[Andy2789]

That's interesting, we do have ESET! It is File Security that is installed on all the servers, with Endpoint on the clients. But interesting that they also had ESET, I will have a look. The only thing I can now thing with ESET if the on access scanning, is trying to scan the same file over and over when the file is requested.

[computer_expert]

Memory was a little hazy, but here is the post I mentioned earlier: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2008-r2/189923-server-2008-r2-locking-up.html

[Andy2789]

Thanks for this, just sat and read through it. Good News! (NOT!) We have a Dell server with a H730 RAID and we use ESET, so it sounds like we may have something similar taking effect. Thanks very much, I will do some digging and report back if I found out what it is. Really odd we are running ESET on all our servers, so we may have more of an issue than we are aware of. Just the loads on the server isn't as high so we aren't seeing the effects as much.

[Foresthippy]

I remember a problem like this with Office 2010, where attempting to open a network shared file from multiple computers caused long delays. It was down to a problem with trusted locations within office. I think it had to be enabled for network locations.