Extremely slow connection with no apparent reason

[joeblk]

Hi All.
Could somebody please help me with this. I have a Dell machine running 2003 server that is grinding to a halt. The machine is almost non-responsive. Lately it takes forever to do anything on it.

The machine has been fine up until last week with no apparent reason. I have not installed anything on it, not even updates.

It started with one of my remote users complaining that they are sometimes not able to log on to the machine (this symptom is intermittent) and then I checked and also was unable to log on to it. It occasionally came up with a messge: the connection to the remote computer was broken. This may have been caused by a network error. Please try connecting to the remote computer again.

The affected machine is:
Dell PowerEdge 1800
OS: 2003 Server
RAID 5 configuration

My setup is as follows:
User VPN's unto the network and then use remote desktop to log on to this machine (call it computer B). No trouble VPNing to the network, both from external and internal. I also have four other machines on the same subnet and they are not experiencing this problem. RDP takes forever to open up and opens the window in "blocks" which could take up to 3-5 minutes. At other times it comes up with the "the connection to the remote computer was broken" message and refuses to connect. When it manages to connect, it takes unacceptably long to open applications, even bringing up properties page takes > 10 seconds.

I am running the same application/s on the other (identical) machines on the same subnet and they are OK. Even logging on to the machine physically does not make a difference to the response time.

What I have tried so far:
1. I have changed the background selection in RDP to noe and this seems to have improved the connection slightly (NO MORE the connection to the remote computer was broken message), however the problem remains when accessing data.
2. changed MTU to 1360 in the registry
3. reset TCP/IP stack using netsh.exe utility (this did not produce any log - not surprising since nothing has changed on the machine)
4. rebooted like a million times
5. Pinging the machine gets a reply

The performance has not improved and I have practically ran out of ideas and need your assistance/suggestions to try and resolve this.

Please HELP!

Thanks
Joe

Could this be Hardware issues?? even though nothing in the event log suggests any problem?

 

[SamBones]

If it's slow when you log onto it "physically", then I don't think it's your network configuration (I assume you mean logging in at the console). Have you brought up Task Manager and looked for processes eating a lot of CPU, memory, or generating a lot of IO?

 

[fs483]

Check your event logs for errors. Maybe your raid setup has a problem (defect HD and it's trying to recover from it) ?

 

[joeblk]

Hi All,

Thanks for your suggestions so far.

I have looked in the event log and there are no warnings or errors relating to the problem. Actually the only errors there were about incorrect log ons and a few about printing.

I have also opened task mgr and tried to open as many applications as possible but the CPU usage mainly stays at 0% - 11%. (now please correct me if I'm wrong but I would expect the usage to be a lot higher than that).

So could the machine be having a "memory leak"? If so, then how do I rectify it please?

I also tried to ghost it last night, but it says it will take over 80 hours to ghost a 12gb partition. I left it running overnight but by the time I checked this morning it had times out.

Thanks all for your contribution so far.......

Joe

 

[SamBones]

You should be able to find the memory usage in Task Manager. Also, if it is a memory leak, it should be faster just after a reboot. Unless the memory hog is loading at startup.