Does anyone know exactly what a work item is and how they are used by NT Server? Unfortunately I have been unable to find much information on this subject. I have a policy server (Dell Poweredge 1300, 2x PIII 500, 256Mb, 2x 8.4SCSI)which dishes out group policy settings to users as they logon to the network. The number of clients it serves can be as high as 550 concurrent users. A few months back, before I managed to get a hold of the Dell Poweredge server, I had an old single processor PII 400 Compaq Desktop PC with 128Mb being used as the policy server... not ideal I know, but it's all I could scrounge of head office at the time!! Whenever large amounts of users started to login and pull the policy down to their workstations, some of the users would get a grey screen instead of their wallpaper. The policy server (desktop!) suffered from "a lack of available work items". I've managed to find bits and pieces from Technet which have lead to several registry entries in the Lanman Server\Parameters section which helped the situation and now that the desktop PC has been replaced with a proper server, the problem has never re-occurred. However, I've noticed the following activity when monitoring 'Available Work Items' and 'Current Clients' from Performance Monitor. Lets say that the server is serving 0 clients. The available work items is at 512. As users start logging on, the number of clients goes up and the available work items go down... pretty much as expected. It appears that for every client being served, 3 work items are used. After, lets say, 70 clients are being served, the available work items value is around about 4-7. Then... 20 more clients logon, but the available work items stay's the same. I'm not sure, but I think this is because the server allocates additional work items as and when needed. At the end of the day, 500 or so people all logoff, but the available work items value shoots up to well over 1000 and has so far reached a maximum of 2790!!! However, the next morning, as soon as users start logging back on, lets say about 50 clients, the available work items value drops like dotcom shares and is back to having 4-7 available work items left. What the hell happened to the rest of them?!? Anyway... enough waffelling, if you've managed to read (and understand me) this far, thanks!! Any Thoughts / Ideas? Cheers, Tony Mitchell Server Administrator ITV Digital http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ntsysadmin_list_charter.htm
