Unfortunately the guy who can OK me opening a ticket with PSS is not back
till next week. Don't get me started on the public sector - it's the only
place I know where people seem to be able to take holidays without
delegating responsibilities. But I shall be suggesting it when he returns.

I don't know that a rip and replace will help, but I didn't do the initial
server build (which has then been cloned out to the entire farm), so I'm
tempted to suspect that may be the point of origin. Naturally I will build
just the one server to start with to see if I can prove or disprove the
suspicion first.

On 14 April 2011 15:53, Andrew S. Baker <[email protected]> wrote:

> Given that data, wouldn't opening a ticket with Microsoft be worth it?
>
> If you don't know what is causing it, how will ripping and replacing it
> help?
>
>
>
> *ASB *(Professional Bio <http://about.me/Andrew.S.Baker/bio>)
>  *Technology Services that Maximize Business Results...
>
>  *
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 10:38 AM, James Rankin <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> I wouldn't normally ask this, but I'm kind of at my wits' end. Is there
>> anyone out there who could maybe have a look at a Process Monitor logfile
>> and tell me if they can see any kind of "smoking gun" in there?
>>
>> The situation is this - we have 2008 R2 Terminal Servers that occasionally
>> will start treading water, resulting in horrendous logon times for users.
>> We've tried disabling just about everything, GPOs, AppSense, EdgeSight,
>> SCOM, antivirus, we have patched them to the hilt with every hotfix we can
>> find for every piece of software, run countless monitors and logs, sent
>> details to various support teams, even had a Citrix consultant on site to
>> offer his opinion, yet still the problem exists. We have carefully monitored
>> the apps in use on the problem systems (which seem to be completely random)
>> and can find no correlation between application usage and the occurrence of
>> this issue. The servers have been monitored by several different tools,
>> native and otherwise, and do not red-line in any way apart from occasional
>> spikes of memory usage and page faults, but nothing happens that seems to
>> justify the terrible performance slowdown that occurs. The servers are
>> physical Compaq DL360 G6 systems with 16GB of RAM and 16 CPUs.
>>
>> Luckily I managed to capture a ProcMon log the last time this problem
>> happened (usually running it causes the server to come to a complete halt,
>> more or less). Rather interestingly, when the logon completed, the ProcMon
>> log was actually running two minutes behind "real-time" - it took two
>> minutes to catch up with what was actually happening "live" on the server!
>> I've had a good hunt through this, but I'm more used to looking for
>> application issues than trying to troubleshoot a logon with ProcMon, and I
>> simply don't know what to look for to try and identify the causes of the
>> slowdown. Microsoft's removal of the user environment debug logging in 2008
>> and up is a real pain, as it was (fairly) straightforward to troubleshoot
>> the logon process previously.
>>
>> I am fairly sure that the problem is something intrinsic to the system -
>> i.e. not caused by a third-party piece of software. I'm on the verge of
>> recommending that the whole server farm is ripped and replaced but I want to
>> make sure I've covered all my bases before I go down that route.
>>
>> If anyone can help with this, please ping me offline and I'll gladly
>> provide access to the (monstrously large, given that the logon I was
>> monitoring took six minutes) log file. Or if anyone has any pointers that
>> they think might help with the performance, I'll also gladly take them on
>> board.
>>
>> TIA,
>>
>>
>>
>> JRR
>>
>> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
> ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/>  ~
>
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