Long response times running all systems/programs

[Rydra]

One of my server 2003 boxes is having a rough old time.

 

Logging in, or access remote shares from other computers responds absolutely fine, right clicking on menus/desktop responds fine. But as soon as you run anything, be it opening up part of control panel, a program, an explorer window, it just grinds to a halt, and takes minutes to open whatever it is.

 

Opening up task manager, the only 2 processes using CPU are Spoolsv.exe (25%) and Taskmgr.exe (25%)

 

Hard drives are nowhere near full, Memory is on average about 1.5GB of 4GB in use, Processor is an Intel Xeon x3220 Quad Core 2.39 GHz.

 

Hard drives are a mirrored 2 drive Raid array with 2 partitions, and a Terrastation NAS, 1.2TB Raid 5 connected via an iSCSI connection.

Server OS is Windows Server 2003 Standard edition Service Pack 2

 

Server is running DNS, as a print server, and a html based website is hosted on it's main C drive (don't ask....), and IIS.

Also has some Winsuite services running on it, as I still have a couple of machines left running WinSuite: they are due to come out in the very near future.

Antivirus suite is Kaspersky Server edition

 

It's been suggested by a friend i've got a memory leak somewhere, but the few guides i've seen on how to find that require me to turn off then on every program that runs in services, startup etc. That could take rather a long time with each click taking up to 10 minutes on a bad day.

 

Don't know if there's any windows updates required, the Auto updater is turned off as the server is taking so long to respond it times out on attempting to run updates.

 

Any suggestions, idea's? I'm running out of them.

[valisnow]

Check if any antivirus scan is running on the machine, also check for viruses!

[sukh]

Hi

 

Run the server in safe mode and see the response of the server.

 

Let me know the results.

 

Thanks

Sukh

[EduTech]

I would also make sure that the on-access scanning is not on with your AV and likewise try safe mode at a time which is convenient. what ping response times are you getting our of curiosity? obviously if on local LAN your not getting <1ms there is a bit of an issue somewhere!

 

James.

[Rydra]

The AV is misbehaving atm, I had to turn it off as it wasn't running the updater in a timely manner, and in fact hasn't updated in a couple months and manual wasn't working.

 

Turning the AV off didn't affect performance at all, so no On-access scans running or anything like that.

 

Due to this and some other updates, I'm rebooting the server in about half an hour; I should have just enough time to fire up in safemode before I need to get it up and running again.

The AV system isn't working as intended and stopped pushing out updates it seems a couple months ago. I will be reinstalling it very shortly, hence half the reason for the reboot. But the server wasn't working properly before the AV seems to have misbehaved.

[Rydra]

After 4 reboots, and a complete uninstall and reinstall of some software, it looks like it was something to do with a corruption of the AV suite, or the old AV administration kit that I decommissioned and migrated to another server last year, but didn't uninstall.

 

ALso turns out it had nuked the servers ability to install windows updates, so it took over 1 hour to shut the server down on one of the reboots for updates!

 

But at least for now the server is running smoother than it ever has, and time will tell if it's solved once and for all.