Windows SBS 2003

[Sameer G]

Hello Everybody,


I have a Windows SBS 2003, which is primarily used as a file server. Shared folders with plain ascii text files are accessed by users to read and write through a DOS 16 bit application. Users also use the shared folder to view "images" in the DOS application.

My challenge is

(a) The Page/Sec is peaking to 100% every 10 seconds and the result is erratic performance - delays experienced by user.

(b) The disk queue also peaks to 70-100% once in 10 seconds.

The server is a Dell PowerEdge 2800 with 4 GB RAM and a Raid 5 System. Approx 30-50 users connect to the Server at a time. The primary is a PDC for the domain. All possible services are stopped on this server and DNS, WINS etc is load balanced to a secondary server.


Any help to improve the performance of the server will be sincerely appreciated. Please let me know if I can offer any more stats to diagonize this further.

Thanks.



- Santy Balan

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Here are few statistics of the Server :-


TOtal Memory : 4 GIG
Raid 5
C Drive : 12 GB {paging file : 2 - 2 GB}
D Drve : 240 GB {paging file : 8 - 20 GB}

Acting as File Server for shared folders. Accessed by 30-50 users to read/write text files into the shared fodler.

Pages per sec... peaks to 100% about every 10 seconds
Average Disk Queue peaks to 70-80% about every 10 seconds

Process Stats

% of User Time = 5-10%
% of Processor Time = 100%
% of Privileged Time = 100%

Memory
Available Bytes = 100%
Free System Page Table Entries = 100%
Commit Limit = 100%
Page Reads = Spikes in 10 sec upto 100%
Page writes < 5%
Transition faults/sec = spikes in 10 sec upto 100%

Physical Disk
Average Disk Queue = Spikes in 10 sec upto 100%
Paging File
% of paying file usage < 1 % constant

Commit Charge (K)
Total : 2490632
Limit : 14409488
Peak : 2544516

Physical Memory (K)
Total : 4193360
Available : 1663572
System Cache : 1854808

Kernel Memory (K)
Total : 124652
Paged : 73828
NonPaged : 50824

Totals :
Handles : 25707
Threads : 1090
Processes : 74

CPU Usage = 2%
Commit Charge : 2431M/14071M
PF Usage : 2.37 GB

[Igor Karasik]

RAID-5 performance is not so good, especially write performance.
Especially if you use same RAID-5 array for OS and for data.
If you can create separate RAID-1 for OS and separate RAID-1 for data I think it will improve performance.
(Adding more disks to your RAID-5 array will improve performance too, but RAID-1 is better option)
Also, which RAID controller you use in Dell server? (I hope you have RAID controller and don't use software RAID...)
Maybe you can add cache memory to RAID controller as well.
One more question - which LAN you use (10/100/1000 Mb) ?

[Sameer G]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes - we are using Hardware RAID controller - came with Dell PowerEdge 2800.

Lan is 100 MPS.