jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Thu Sep 24 09:56:56 CDT 2009
I have a situation way outside my expertise. Yea, yea, I know a lot of you would ask what is IN my expertise, we can discuss that another day. Anyway, I run two Windows 2003 X64 servers. Quad core, 16 gigs ram, RAID6 arrays. Reasonably powerful. Mostly I run SQL Server on one and VMs on the other. In BOTH CASES I have told the software, SQL Server for instance, to only use X gigs of RAM, to leave 2.5 gigs for the OS and other applications. And yet, SQL Server starts a long running process and the server becomes unresponsive. In some instances for example, I can load a spreadsheet or whatever... but it takes forever to load. Just clicking the start button I have to wait 30 seconds for the start menu to show. Like that. I have a query running which is updating a field in a medium size table - 8 million records or so. I tried to load another instance of SQL Server. It loaded, but when I clicked on the databases icon to drop down and show me the databases it just put up expanding and locked up the entire system. I am at a loss to discover what is going on. It APPEARS to be SQL Server, though there is nothing else I run that uses all the memory in this thing so how do I know it isn't just Windows 2003 flaking out somehow? I have run memtest-86 for an entire weekend without a single failure, so I don't think it is the physical memory. I have no clue how to troubleshoot this problem. As I write this, the server is completely locked up. I cannot switch between tasks, the little task manager icon shows about 50% CPU usage but AFAICT that is just what was displayed when it locked up. In the end I have to do a hard reboot to regain control, and when I do that I corrupt whatever database was being worked on. This is insane! HELP. -- John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com