Speed issues are always difficult to troubleshoot because modern computers do so much, this is especially true of a server and doubly so of an SBS server. So when a customer recently said that their software was running slowly where did I start?
Task Manager
Open up task manager and have a look at those readings under the performance tab. Is memory usage high, is CPU usage high, is disk utilization high or is network utilization high? These would give a good indication of where to start. CPU usage was very low <10% but all other figures were 20% or higher.
Performance Monitor
Type perfmon /report in the "run" box and it will run a quick 1 minute diagnosis of the computer. It will give green, amber and red lights depending on what it considers to be of concern. This may not lead you to the cause of the problem in hand but it seemed like as good a place as any to get some more info. The problem with this approach is that it may indicate something as ok when it is performing much worse than usual so it is important to have a baseline performance benchmark. I did not, but I had a feeling an SBS server with 5 users should not have so much disk IO caused by 1 or 2 standard server processes.
Memory Usage
8Gb seemed like a perfectly reasonable amount of memory for an SBS 2008 server, but given the greater than 90% usage, I thought I'd try to bring it down a bit. Open up Task Manager and under processes select View and choose columns, then select PID. Sort the processes by Memory usage and I found sqlserver right at the top. Then open a command prompt (type cmd in the run box) and type at the prompt tasklist /svc |find "sql"
When the command returns it will display several processes each with their PID, now compare the PID to the one at the top of the list in Task Manager and see if you can find the exact database name from the other list.
SBS Monitoring seems to be one of the chief culprits of memory usage so I restricted this to under 1Gb
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/smallbusinessserver/thread/d195baac-da8b-4387-9079-c55d5e1879b4
http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2009/07/14/sbs-2008-console-may-take-too-long-to-display-alerts-and-security-statuses-display-not-available-or-crash.aspx
I have kind of run out of time to get this blog finished properly and I'd rather publish it than leave it here languishing, so perhaps I'll update it when I get chance but for now, I hope this helps. If you'd like to discuss it with me then please contact The PC Support Group on +44 (0) 845 2233116.
No comments:
Post a Comment