Hi there, I have been trying to sort out a slow server issue when connecting remotly to windows server 2003 terminal sessions, I have had a look at the performance and it seems that the server in question is constantly using 1.03gb of PF, the server itself has 2.046gb RAM, the server runs an accounting program as well as people using office and outlook, is the PF usage to high? should i be obtaining more RAM, do you think this why im having problems??
Appreciate the help.
SWESupport
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If the server has 2gb of ram and you are only using 1gb then chances are the memory size is not what was causing your bottlneck. If you said that you had 1gb of ram and 2gb of pf was in use then I would say add more ram.
What happens when you go over the amount of your physical RAM is that your comuter uses much slower harddrisk space to act as ram. Of course the hard disk data access is much slower than that of the RAM so you would see a slowdown there.
How big is the page file? Paging in windows is a normal activity, and its not a best practice to disable paging completely. The RAM + the Page file = Commit limit of the system. When any processes starts up it allocates some amount of memory in the RAM, this is called the working set of the process, the less touched pages in the working set of the process will be moved to a list called the standby pages, if the process needs this page again it will be quickly faulted back to the working set again. standby pages are like a page of memory (RAM) which has one foot already out of the process working set, the standby pages if not used for a certain amount of time will be moved to the disk (Page file), now, if this page is again requested by the process this will cause a hard page fault as it has to be retrieved from the page file this time and will have more latency.
secondly, a system wide paging operation will be triggered by the Memory manager if the system experiences a low memory condition (theoriticaly 4 mb available RAM), but performance degradation might occur much before this threshold. when a low memory condition is encountered, the working set of all the processes are trimmed by the working set trimming thread and the process data will be moved to the page file to make room in RAM, so in your case if you are seeing excessive paging we need to find out which process is using the most amount of memory (the private bytes counter in perfmon needs to be checked). set up a perfmon log with all the memory and page file counter and keep it running in the background while reproducing the issue. after the issue is reproduced, stop the log and view the counters in perfmon. excessive paging operation involves disk activity and will degrade system performance, if we have a memory leak in a process, even adding more RAM will not help, we need to fix the process itself. hope this helps. --- Madhur
I have been monitoring the processes for over 2 hours now and research leaks on each of them, whilst restarting the services as well to see how quickly they are drawing the memory, currently the page file is 1gb.
I have found a couple of workarounds for some processes, so hopefully at the end of it all i will get better performance.
Whats the value for "Memory" > "%Commited Bytes in use" counter in perfmon? if its too high more than 80%, you can increase the page file and monitor the server. set the page file to custom> 3072 MB min and max.
questions:
OS? win2k3 / 2k8
Architecture: 32 bit / 64 bit?
Is the server a virtual machine or physical? if its virtualized, is it Vmware or HyperV?
Where do you see the slowness exactly, while logging in? or the over all TS session experience is slow? whats the behavior at the physical console? is it slow there too? does a reboot fix the problem for a while?
Let me know the following counter values in perfmon when the issue is happening:
Process > Handle count total (if its high we will have to look at individual handle counts for processes)
Paging File > "%usage"
Memory > Free System Page Table entries
Memory > Available megabyte
Memory > Commit Limit
Memory > Pool Non Paged Bytes
Memory > Pool Paged Bytes
A couple points:
1. A TS will always try to leave as much RAM available for users as possible so using the paging file is not really an issue (unless things are paged ALL the time).
2. 2GB RAM does not mean anything in a TS world without knowing how many users you have concurrently on this box. If this is a server for 1 user that is a lot of RAM. If you are trying 100 concurrent users this is very low. So without knowing how many users you have and which apps they run it is impossible to say anything about your TS.
3. On the applications topic, if you run Office on this server make sure you ELIMINATE CTFMON. It is well known for causing all sorts of slowness on TSs and Microsoft is aware of that and provides instructions on how to get rid of it.
4. How often do you reboot this TS? Ideally TSs should be rebooted on a daily basis for several reasons. This will help with memory leaks and so on.
5. All this and MUCH more about TS is on the free guide I wrote, an 80-page beast, available for download at http://www.wtslabs.com. The guide is "Terminal Services A to Z".
Cheers.
Cláudio Rodrigues
Citrix CTP
FYI
Performance Monitoring Screenshot
The screenshot shows that high CPU activity for kernel mode (priviledged mode), Do you see high CPU usage for the system process in task manager > processes?
If you see more red lines in CPU usage section as shown in the task manager screenshot, its a problem.
If you do not see any processes with CPU usage in the task manager, there might be high DPC or interrupts. these things run in the kernel mode and you won't be able to see it from task manager.
The system process is a container for kernel mode threads, so if you see high CPU usage for system process in task manager > processes tab, it means some thread running in the kernel mode is pegging the CPU.
Do you constantly see more red lines in the CPU Usage section in task manager > Performance tab?
if yes, the server slowness is most probably due to high cpu usage by a kernel mode thread, high Interrupts or high DPC.
You can run "process explorer" tool from www.sysinternals.com to check these and what is running under the "system" process
Click on start > Run > type in "Perfmon" and hit enter
in "System Monitor" hit the "+" icon on the toolbar to bring up the counters box
select "Processor" from the object list and select "%DPC time" and %interrupt time from the list
click add
hit ok
what values do you see for these two counters?
I don't see problems with memory in the screenshot. this seems more like a high cpu usage in kernel mode.
In a 32-bit OS the memory maps are limited to 4GB.
PF uses a different memory map than system RAM and each one is limited to 4GB.
For best performance the PF should be set manually to 1.5x physical memory -as long as- it is less than 4GB.
With 2GB of physical RAM your PF should be set to 3GB.
-
If you had 3GB of physical RAM your PF should be set to 4GB. [Address table size limit overrides the 1.5x.]
If you had 4GB of physical RAM your PF should be set to 4GB. [Address table size limit overrides the 1.5x.]
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by: alanhardistyPosted on 2009-10-28 at 17:39:51ID: 25689661
When you bring up Task Manager (CTRL + SHIFT + ESC) - look on the performance tab. Where is the Page File Graph line approx? Half way up the chart?
If it is higher than about 40%, then you could probably do with more memory
If your server is 32-bit then it can only use about 3Gb of memory and your PF use is probably not unreasonable based on the 2Gb of memory. Add up to 4Gb of memory if it has to be installed in pairs - you cannot use it all, but better to have more than less.
Windows likes memory - so the more you can give it to play with the better it will perform.