Processor

Hoping someone will have an idea for me about a processor problem on one of my servers. This is the situation: I was notified by a developer that a server of mine that he uses for his applicaions was running slow. I started up performance monitor and added a counter for performance time. It is consistently running above 90%. So I opened up task manager and looked at the processes running and their cpu utilization. However, none of the listed processes were shown to be running abnormally. The cpu time on all processes is very low. I don't understand this at all. If anyone has any thoughts I'd love to hear them. I'm not sure what additional information might be needed to further diagnose this, but if anyone has any questions please post them and I will reply. Thank you.

Steveb12,

Wired problem indeed. You would have expected to get a detail analysis with the application or process causing the CPU to be so high.

All I can suggest is that you take a look around for an alternative program to view the CPU and Thread utilization. There are a number of such applications in www.download.com , www.tucows.com that you can try see which one suites your needs.

I also found this other application called NTSMF which looks promising so check it out aswell : www.demandtech.com/NTSMF-vs-Perfmon.htm


Do let us know what the outcome was!!

Good luck!

Thanks for the idea Chris. I will try some other utilities. I will post if anything else develops. To add something, myself and one of my colleagues suspect one of the developer applications is causing a memory leak because occasionally one of the apps will sned a text pop up to the screen showing a memory error. However, since the software is proprietary and neither of us have any programming experience we have no way to prove this.

Steve, correct me if I'm wrong (Tom and Sahir would certainly know) but if a application has a memory leak, wouldn't it hog up memory, increasing its memory consumption until no more memory is available?

If this is so, then suspect application should chew up the system's resources and this would be evident in the Task Manager.

Perhaps you could also look for programs that check the amount of memory they use, this would certainly allow you to pin point the application thats causing the problem.

memory leak - n. An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion.

That said, it could be that the system is running low on RAM which will cause it to swap out to disk.. thus slowing things down substantially.. however I don't see why that should generate high CPU times, also it would ultimately result in a complete loss of memory and the system would go down.. (especially in the case of a server that has a high uptime).

I find task manager fairly accurate.. have the developer who notified you of the problem replicate what he was doing (if possible) while you monitor the system and see what processes are hogging CPU.

How slow exactly is the machine ? Is it just a little slower than normal ? In which case you might consider rebooting or even doing a defrag (especially if it is constantly moving large files around). Does the system seem unusably slow to you when you're at the console ? If nothing seems amiss there then could it be possible that the fault lies elsewhere... does the developer use the server over the network ? Did you have MyDoom or something similar clogging your networks.. or his machine ? Something like that could potentially make everything seem slower.. by both hogging cpu resources on his client machine, as well as clogging up the network.

My point is, what has made you correlate the slowdown with the CPU ?

Thanks for your new replies guys. Let me try to provide more info based on what you posted.

I also received a more accurate view of the situation from one of our programmers. The pop up messages indicating a memory problem with the developer's application do not just pop up periodically - apparently they will not go away! It is a typical pop up message in that it identifies an application error and you can click "ok" and you would expect the pop up to disappear. However when you click "ok" the message comes right back.

That said, it doesn't appear to be a memory leak. Upon further investigation with the developer this problem has been occuring for sometime now; apparently weeks. This tells me if it were a memory leak the application would've crashed by now.

The server has (2) 1.3Ghz cpu's and over 2GB of RAM so I definitely do not believe this to be a hardware problem. Plus the RAM is not pegging out when looking at memory usage through the task manager.

In answer to you questions Sahirh, I'm not sure you understood my post.

"I find task manager fairly accurate.. have the developer who notified you of the problem replicate what he was doing (if possible) while you monitor the system and see what processes are hogging CPU."

- problem here is that no processes are hogging the cpu.

Also, the server itself is not seen as slow from operating it at the console. It's not as if the mouse is slow or that it locks up when trying to open a folder. I was notified that the server was running slow because the application that runs on this server 24/7 (production environment) was not processing data as fast as it normally does. The virus defs on the server are up to date and it was scanned already. I am pushing to reboot the server right now, but as I said this is a production server that runs 24/7 and people are pushing back at me not to reboot the server.

Taking all that into account, this is what I believe it all boils down to. Given that there seems to be a constant application error occuring and I cannot find anything amiss with any processes shown to be running on the server I believe the application is causing the cpu utilization to max out. I don't think any of the programmers want to step up and admit they don't know what is wrong with their own program. I think that whatever needs to be done on the the programming backend so that I can reboot this server and not lose data needs to be done now. )I forgot to mention that the server has not been re-booted in around 30 days.) So that is the direction I'm going to take. Let me know if you have other thoughts and thanks!