exch2k win2k slow response after 2pm daily

[kathw]

I have a win2k server with exchange2k sp3 which after 2pm daily slows down and response is reallllly bad. There is no indexing on the server and it supports only about 40 users. It is a p4 350mhz with 512 meg ram. I has heaps of free disk. I have check no antivirus scans are running and the event logs are clear. All service packs are up to date. Any ideas where to look next would be greatly appreciated.
Thank
Kath

 

[speedracercjr]

Do you have to reboot for the performance to come back to normal?

 

[kathw]

No, the system simply seems to recover overnight and performance is ok in the morning. The machine is also the PDC, GC etc for the domain. There is a second DC on the same network as well(same domain) I have looked at traffic stats and cant see anything unusual

Thanks for the help

 

[jnonne]

When the server slows down, open your task manager to see if there any processes using the CPU.

At the command prompt, run a "netstat -a > c:\netstat.txt" then check the text file to see if there are any unusual network connections. The netstat -a command will display all active network connections to the server. I dump it to a text file then open it with notepad because mine is quite large. (I found an open http proxy port and ftp port this way.)

 

[speedracercjr]

Do you have any batch jobs running? Also check ESM and see if there is alot of emails going out? Maybe your being used as an open relay.

 

[kathw]

I have no scheduled batch jobs and i have checked ordb.org - we are not listed there - I have checked the email queue's and they look fine - no unexplained traffic anyway. I ran some monitoring on usage yesterday and cant see anything using resources during the time we have the problem. I will collect the netstat info today.

Thanks for all your help

 

[jsd2003]

I think I read somewhere that MS recommends that Exchange and the GC be on separate servers, if possible of course. I don't recall any rationale given for this recommendation though.