Irregular Pings

[MattBlackbrough]

Hi

A customer of ours has an HP DL140 G2 with dual Intel Xeon 3.4GHz processors. They are experiencing irregular ping times, some negative and some claiming to be huge. The symptoms sound similar to an issues i've seen with Dual Core AMD chips but I can't seem to find anything relating to Xeons.

Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=193435751ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=193435751ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=193435751ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=193435751ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=193435751ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=193435926ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=193435926ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=193435926ms TTL=255
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=255

Ping statistics for 10.0.0.1:
Packets: Sent = 449, Received = 449, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 193435926ms, Average = 6087231ms

I want to point out that the high ping times actually respond extremely quickly.

I have tried running cmd.exe using a specific instance of a CPU (with HT on) and it appeared to relate to HT, only appearing on 2 of the 4 cpus. I turned HT off and still have the problem when setting the affinity to CPU1.

It is affecting group policy processing and file replication.

Does anyone have any suggestions to a fix?

Thanks

Matt

[KarloChacon]

hi

is the firmware updated //Bios and NIc Cards?

are yo using NIC Teaming?

Drivers for Nic Cars updated?

regards

[MattBlackbrough]

HI

Thanks for the reply

I havenâ t tried updating firmware on the Bios or NICs but I will check which version is running. Itâ s a customerâ s server so itâ s a bit difficult scheduling down time with them.

Network drivers have been updated and there is no teaming in place. Originally I suspected the network card however the server has 2 cards, connected to separate subnets, both experiencing the problem.

I'll look at firmware and come back

Thanks

Matt

[Scott_59]

Be careful if you apply firmware updates to a teamed NIC - it has totally broken ours numerous times !

Scott

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi Matt,

What OS are you running ?

Cheers,

Rob

[MattBlackbrough]

Hi

Windows 2003 Server Std currently with SP1.

Thanks

Matt

[ECCo, Dennis Nielsen]

Hi

I saw a similar problem om my BL465c AMD blade servers.

I installed the following patch from AMD, and the problem went away :-)

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/AMD_Processor_Driver_1320053.zip

Of course this solution is only valid for AMD CPU systems.