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Disk % Time Performance always high

We have a problem with one of our servers in the office. We have 5 identical servers. Same model, same HD, memory etc. Everything is fine for the 4 of the servers. One of them (the red line in the attachment) is always very high (% Disk Time) in the Performance log. Even when all of the users are logged out (all of the users are being used as application servers via terminal services) Application3 is showing activity. We replaced the disks (Mirror) we scanned for viruses, spywares etc but we didn't find anything. Also have in mind that the users logged in each server every day are different. (We use Sun Rays and the sessions are doing load balancing)

The servers are SUN 4150 with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, 16GB memory and 2 Quad Code Processors.

What could be the cause for this?

Thanks.
docPerformance.doc

Thorbear_Icemountain

Have you tried to monitor the network traffic of that specific server during low activity hours? Does the problem go away if you disconnect the server from the network (if possible)? I had a firewall causing the same problem for a server once..

AJKBOC

ASKER

No I hanen't tried disconnecting it from the network. But I don't think this would be the cause for this since the new attached performance snapshot shows problem in the Average Disk Write Queue Length.

I am attaching a new snapshot with the Performance of 3 of my servers showing the Average Queue Lenghts. Application 3 is the one that has the problem. If you see the Queue Lengh has a max of 11 and average of 2.75 where the other have a max of 1.2 and 0.9 and an average of 0.109 and 0.137.

What could be a solution for this? (hard disks have already been replaced)
docPerformance2.doc

Thorbear_Icemountain

Run Filemon and see what is beeing written....
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896642.aspx

AJKBOC

ASKER

Thanks for the tip. I ran Filemon just now but there are thousands of entries. How to I use this?

Thorbear_Icemountain

You start and stop a capture by pressing Ctrl+E. I usually search for a process that is overrepresented and try to find info on that process. You can also check the Path and look for suspected entries. There is a bunch of KB articles at the bottom of the page where you download the tool

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AJKBOC

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