Windows 2003 Server hanging up, running VERY slow.

I would start with a look at the event logs to see what Windows sees from its side.  Look for event reports that are appearing around the time the drops in performance are happening if they are intermittent.

I would also download Malware Bytes, install it and run a scan as a precaution just in case.

What antivirus solution are you running?

TM worryfree business.  However, keep in mind nothing here is connected to the internet.  I actually removed it for the time being thinking it could be causing the problem.

When you pull up Mega Raid Power Console to checkout the raid it take a while to populate the drives.  Also, the logs are showing "Adapter 1, Port 3 Physical drive is in Ready state(Failure history follows), reason_0=Select timeout, reason_1=Select time out.

I also noticed (since this began but this has been in the logs for a while here and there.  I just never noticed . . . .

Adapter 1, Target 6: is going to fail.

So I have a drive going bad i would guess.
However, this message has showed up as "information" in the app log for probably 8 months here and there.

Thanks for the assistance.  Much appreciated.

It also take a wicked long time to initialize on reboot.

could a drive labeled as "will fail" by the RAID controller cause the system to freeze, hesitate, stutter, etc?

also, after i replace the drive and let the array rebuild . . . . .  should raid 5's be defragged?  age old question.   Within disk management an analyze show both raid 5 volumes should be defragged.

No file system error on either partition . . . . Thanks again.

So you have been getting this error message for 8 months, but havent done anything about it? and NOW you are wondering if this could be the issue thats causing problems?

5 months to be precise, occasionally logged as "information" which I did not notice until the problem arose.  Did you post have anything to do with being helpful or just taking a jab at someone trying to work through a problem?
Thank you.

bump

Maybe I shouldn't poke the bear but I'll throw this one in...

Are your nightly backups working without error? Have you done the odd restore from the backup server to your workstation to verify the backups are usable?

Yes, server backups work fine but are done nightly.  Losing a days work would be a big PIA but we do not have the storage to do continuous incremental.  We use "Shadow Protect" which is expensive but works excellent.  I am not sure if this will help anyone but the problem has been solved and I am not sure which thing actually solved it as I implemented both simultaneously but . . . .

1st, there was a hot spare drive in the raid 5 set which had dropped out of the raid but did not report any error.  When you opened the LSI raid manager and it got to port 3 where the hotspare was it would hang and hang.  Anyway, that drive was bad so I replace it.

Next, we have applications which run on a windows xp box.  When you query the pervasive DB from a client often times you must go to this XP box to get info back from outside sources which then ultimately arrive back to the DB.

This xp box had file system errors on it and was definitely running slower then it should have.  I imaged the box and ran chkdsk c:/r/f which rectified the file system errors.

After doing both the above everything started working well once again.
Thanks for all your input. The suggestions help more then you will every know.

Thank you very much.