General system performance problems!

[Janez Makovsek]

Hi!

I reported before that we are having problems with arrays. Now I think I am getting closer to the actual problem. Installing new drivers on latest firmware (HP DL 180, on Smart Array P400) and enabling write cache had no major impact. Attached is an image of the network traffic while copying a 2GB file. The file is copied from host (W2008) to guest VM W2008 OS.

Note that during first 10s, the file was copied at 100Mbytes/s. Then the pattern visible on the picture started. It is a duty cycle of 30% with 60% gaps of zero activity in between.

This is exactly what is happening when copying a file localy from one dir to the next.

It seems that the entire system, has the same problem.

Things crossing my mind:
- there is a CPU interrupt problem?
- there is a failing cable somewhere?

Any other ideas what could be wrong?

Note that this is a fresh installation of
W2008 on a new HP DL 180 and I would appreciate if you could report your own expirience. It should also be easy to reproduce problem. The computer is fitted with two Xenon L5410 and 8GB of RAM.

Thanks!
Atmapuri

[Bill Speers]

have you tried a disk check? if not cautiously try that.

is it only this file or others? are you using disk compression?

does the file ever successfully copy? if not are there errors? check the event viewer too.

you should look at resource monitor to get a(us) a better picture of the disk perf.

[Graeme Bray]

Have you tried contacting Microsoft to see if they can see any OS disk bottleneck issues? They may have some different report that you could run to see.

You can try getting the updated Storport driver from Microsoft via HotFix that helps alleviate issues between the disks and the array driver.