RPC and SIM... memory leak?

[fishmn]

I've posted a couple times regarding SIM performance and am finding some time to try to isolate why our SIM 5.1sp1 server (4 core DL385 with 4GRAM and high perf remote SQL DB, we've got around 1500 server objects). I've got some good suggestions on ways to filter things but I'm finding that the RPC service will still gradually suck up available memory and the system will start to crawl after about two weeks. It never seems to release memory.

If I use Process Explorer to look at it I find that within hours after a reboot RPC will be using about 1GVM. Within two weeks that will grow to 2GVM. If I look at the TCP/IP component of RPC I see it actively opening connections to numerous servers (not unlike what the WMI mapper and mxdomainmgr do). I assume RPC works in concert with mxdomainmgr, however RPC is the only process that I see consistent climbing memory use.

Am I alone here? We constantly apply all the latest MS security patches so I don't think that is it.. but there could be an improvement to RPC (is that possible? :-)) that we've missed.
Ron

[NJK-Work]

Hi Ron,

I have a very similar configuration you have. A DL380 G5 Quad-Core with 4 GB memory. Except, my SQL database is SQL 2000 and is installed on the same box as SIM (not a remote SQL database). I have 0 problems with memory.

I am wondering if RPC is used by SIM to communicate with the remote SQL database. Anyone know? Perhaps that is the problem. Not sure if this is feasable for you, but perhaps installing SQL on the same box would help? Or maybe make it worse :(

Nelson

[fishmn]

Thanks for the reply Nelson, ya know we had one of HP's consultants come in last year and assist us with the buildup of this SIM server and they recommended going with a remote SQL DB because of the extra overhead for the server to house SQL.

That said if I look at the I/O component of RPC I see it has by far and away the highest number of I/O WRITE's which I would assume would be DB writes.

At this point I really don't have the time to reconfigure to this degree.. but since HP seems to be putting all there enterprise mgt into SIM, We'll be needing a bigger server before long and maybe then we can try a local DB.

[fishmn]

I've had Microsoft working a ticket for over a month now gathering performance data on my SIM server. The believe it is indeed RPC and heap memory consumption.

[fishmn]

After almost two months of working with MS on this thing they finally found that the version of RPC (from one of 2007's security fixes) I had on this server was not releasing memory. They have a not so public fix to this that I installed yesterday. RPC is stable and not consuming memory. YEAH!!

If you notice that your SIM or any other W2K3 box is consuming memory via RPC, take a look at KB330994 and get the fix. I can't believe it took MS this long to identify the fix.

[fishmn]

Sorry, that was kb942880

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942880