Re: Small Business Server 2003 lockups

This sounds to me like some memory leak. I would add the following counters
in the Task Manager vies:
Paged Pool
Non-paged Pool
Handles
VM Size
Mem Usage
Peak Mem Usage
PID
CPU
CPU Time

Then I would regularly check the TM. Pay specifically attention to Handles.
You can order the display to show the process with the highest number of
handles on the top. Any out of the ordinary increase over time indicates
some kind of leak. Once you have the offending process identified, write
down the PID and run "tasklist /svc" (without quotation) in a CMD window to
identify the program behind it.

Hope that this will give you something to go on.

--
Claus
<nicons@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8f951582-d065-4af1-8719-fa7d597085d3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Here is a summary of my problem. The machine is a Dell Poweredge 840
running Small Business Server 2003. For the last 8 months or so the
server has been locking up. It is a full system lockup as we cannot
bring up taskmanager or anything else. Our only option is to hold the
power button and manually reboot. Sometimes it will go a week and a
half with no problems, other times it will lockup 1 to 3 times a day
every day or so. Unfortunately there are absolutely no stop errors or
event log entries to point in any direction. All I get is a system log
message saying that the previous system shut down was unexpected, no
other corresponding messages or minidumps. At this point I have
exhausted all the ideas I can come up with short of reformatting,
reinstalling the OS and rebuilding the domain, which I would like to
avoid of course. Here is the rundown on what I have tried. Virus /
spyware scans all come up clean. Additionally I tried removing the
virus and spyware programs and any other unneeded applications.
Essentially all that is running on the machine now is Avimark (A
veterinary database) and Quicken. I have even shut down services that
we don't use, ie exchange. I have downloaded all the latest updates,
firmware and drivers from Microsoft and Dell. I have run full hardware
diagnostic scans with my UltraX test card and found no problems. I
worked for about 6 weeks with Dell tech support running numerous DSet
scans and hardware diagnostics. During this time we did get a few
stop errors and associated minidumps pointing to an integrated video
hardware issue although they never seemed to correspond to the system
lockups. They replaced the motherboard in October and we haven't had a
stop error since then. They eventually concluded that the lockups are
not hardware related and are now out of the picture. I have swapped
out the PSU and RAM with known good replacements. I have worked with
Avimark tech support and they say they find no problems with the
database. Is there anything else I am missing, or any other tools
available to pin down the problem without reformatting and rebuilding
the domain?


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