Website Slow then falls over

[Paul Broomfield]

Hello,   We’re getting a problem on one of our web servers.   Here’s the set-up:   Web Server: Dell Power Edge 2450 Win2k SP2 IIS 5 Norton Antivirus – set-up to avoid the scanning global.asa, (as opening the global.asa can causing site to stop responding)   Database Server Dell Power Edge 2450 Win2k SP1 (I’m applying SP2 shortly) SQL 2000   The web server has a direct connection to the web with no firewall. The database server connects to the web server via a secondary network card in the web server and on a separate IP network and hence hiding the DB server from the outside world.   The web server has 3 sites on it all running different versions of the same site with 3 different versions of our custom built ActiveX component. The 3 sites include - one Live, one customer trial site and one in-house demo/dev site.  The customer is testing new developments on the customer trial site, and their customers are using the live site.   The sites work fine and then after a while they will slow and eventually stop responding.  The server requires a full restart to get it working again, Inetinfo sits near the bottom of the process list not really doing anything and not using a great deal of memory.  I can’t see anything in the process list that is battering the servers’ resources.   We have regressed any new developments we put into the trial site before these problems started to happen, in case it was any strange code making the server crash.   The last weird thing that happened before the sites started playing up, was the web server reported an out of virtual memory error.  The websites stopped working, the server then reallocated memory then came back to life, allowing users to access the sites again.  One thing we noticed after this is that all dates changed to American format rather than United Kingdom format – so we changed these back and restarted the server for good measure.   Looking through the Event Viewer there is nothing too unusual in there apart from an error saying the SSL is screwed, it really says: “A fatal error occurred while creating an SSL server credential”, although the client has a certificate protected site it is not used.  Another error we seem to be getting is script timeouts, but these don’t correlate with server crashes.   We do get lots of CodeRed hack attempts but I patched the server when the hotfix first came out from MS.   Does anybody have any ideas?  As I am running out of them.   Thanks Paul   p.s. if the client had a bad connection to the server that dropped regularly, (due to their overloaded network) could that cause a server not to clear sessions and “get confused” and eventually fall over – I’m clutching at straws now.   Pps.  A virtual luxury apartment anywhere in the world that you want with a virtual keg of beer to anyone that helps.       Paul Broomfield, Network Administrator and Database Technician Tell Communications Tamar Science Park Derriford Plymouth Devon PL6 8BX   Tel: +44 (0) 1752 764242 Fax: +44 (0) 1752 764243   Visit us on the web at: http://www.tell-com.com/   http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ntsysadmin_list_charter.htm