2008 R2 + Facility Slow

[Michael]

Hello all,

 

I have the following setup:

 

Intel Server 3420 GPLC with a Xeon 3430 CPU

16GB DDR3 ECC

RAID 5 (3 physical drives)

Windows Server 2008 R2 Std + SP1, fully patched

 

Latest Intel Rapid Storage and Intel NIC drivers installed.

 

Graphics acceleration disabled and tried disabling Sophos AV services.

 

When loading Facility, the administration window appears quickly and so does the selecting the CDB file. Once you've entered your username/password, it takes a while to load and become available. Does anyone have any suggestions? Many thanks!

[Michael]

Forgot to add also DNS reports back correctly and running dcdiag comes back all OK too.

[john]

Is this slow loading on the server or on a client?

[Michael]

Is this slow loading on the server or on a client?

 

It loads slow on both server and workstation.

[john]

Is SQL on that same server or you have a separate SQL box? Last time I had poor performance like that I had SQL on a VM and the Disk I/O just was too great as Facility really cained the disks worse than any other SQL DB I have ran in a school so far!

[Michael]

SQL's installed on the same box. It's a physical install, not a virtual setup (just so you know).

 

So far we've found that re-installing Facility seems to cure the issue and restore speed, but then after a reboot it seems to go slow again weirdly. CPU and memory levels look normal to me from Task Manager. Network levels also seem normal, connected at gigabit.

[john]

That is really strange, AV causing issues perhaps?

 

Anything else running on the server?

 

It is strange its after a reboot that it goes slow sounds like something that kicks in at startup that is killing it off?

[Michael]

This is what we're trying to investigate. Link2ICT have also contacted Serco regarding the issue and heard nothing back as yet.

 

I also upgraded the BIOS to the latest version and the problem's still there. I've tried disabling the Sophos AV services and it made no difference.

[john]

It feels disk I/O related to me by what you are describing but it shouldnt be with those disks if setup right but just feels wrong.

 

Hows the server feel in general?

[Michael]

The thing is, if it was disk I/O related it would never run at a proper speed - even when re-installed. Why does re-installing it speed Facility back do you think?

 

The server feels OK to me and boots/loads at suitable speeds.

[john]

What version of SQL?

[Michael]

SQL Server 2008. I can see Service Packs 1, 2 and 3 have been installed from Windows Server' Programs and Features.

[john]

Sounds about the same as mine then bar I am running it on 2008 non-R2 as it wasn't supported at the time when I did the install for Serco on this VM. Have you tried reformatting and running it on native 2008 out of interest?

[HenryJr]

Smells IO to me. Sata or Sas disks?

[Michael]

They're SATA disks configured for RAID5, default 64KB strip size.

 

This is using Intel Matrix and interestingly many users (when I googled) have reported poor read performance when using Intel Matrix and RAID5.

 

Some tips I've come across is to enable Write Back Cache on the array, increase the strip size to 128KB but also to uninstall Intel Matrix or Intel Rapid Storage and use Microsoft's own drivers. Problem is, how can I manage/view the array from Windows without this installed? Certainly worth trying instead of re-building the whole server I suppose!

[PeterW]

Perhaps run performance monitor and add the disk queue length monitor to look for disk io issues.

[psydii]

Computer intermittently performs poorly or stops responding when the Storport driver is used in Windows Server 2008 R2

 

General questions:

How many datasets?

How long does it take from entering your password to getting the console.

What difference is there between a client and on the server?

What else is using the SQL Database?

[Michael]

Interesting link psydii. Have you applied this fix yourself?

 

There's just the one database hosted on the server and typically it takes well over a minute to start using Facility (after entering your username and password).

 

Clients are just as slow after entering the username and password for Facility.

[psydii]

No I don't have that deployed to our SQL Server. Our CMIS and SQL servers are virtualised so they aren't affected by the issue, though CMIS is consistently slow to load, but that is a CMIS thing rather than a SQL/Windows issue.

 

Serco have looked our problem and recommended we reduce the number of datasets and archive off most of the reports.

[Michael]

I'm happy to report I've solved the problem. By navigating to Control Panel > Device Manager > Disk drives. Right click the RAID5 array and select Properties > Policies - tick to enable 'Enable write caching on the device'.

 

From entering your username/password in Facility, it takes 10 seconds to load and ready to use.