Bill Patten
bill_patten at embarqmail.com
Thu Sep 24 10:43:04 CDT 2009
Hi John, You can download a program called What's Running ( http://www.whatsrunning.net/Download.aspx ) and it will give you much more information about CPU resource use. It will even show the various programs running inside svchosts. Disk access can also create these types of problems, though I wouldn't expect that in Raid 6. Perhaps a problem in the Raid Controller. The hard disk light may give you a clue if this is the problem area. Bill -------------------------------------------------- From: "jwcolby" <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 7:56 AM To: "Dba-Sqlserver" <dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com>; "Access Developers discussion and problem solving" <accessd at databaseadvisors.com> Subject: [AccessD] HELP, server completely unresponsive 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 -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com