How do I tell which process is accessing the hard drive?

[JBruyet]

Hey all, I have several 2003 servers that I monitor using some basic MMC consoles that I created. the consoles monitor the following stats:

1 - % Processor Time
2 - % Disk Time
3 - % (disk) Idle Time
4 - Pages/sec

At times the servers run at 100% hard drive access with System Idle Process running at 99% and that seems a little unusual to me. I've tried using Process Explorer to try to find out what processes are chewing away on the hard drive but not even PE can figure it out. I tried Googling for a utility that would show what process is accessing the hard drive but no joy. SO, does anyone here know of any utilities that I can run to see what's causing the hard drive access / slow response times for my servers? It doesn't happen all that often, but when it happens that server sits for about 5-10 minutes and then it's fine. I thought maybe I had gotten "bugged" but I installed Wireshark and nothing is going out. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Joe B

 

[NoCalAdmin]

Are these servers SQL servers? If so, are you throttling back SQL to leave RAM for the OS to perform its required tasks?

Tom

 

[JBruyet]

Only one of the servers is a SQL server, but it's usually not a problem child like the rest. I would saw my worst offenders are just plain old file servers storing user files. Also, before anyone asks my antivirus scans are scheduled to run at night.

Thanks,

Joe B

 

[NoCalAdmin]

do you have Indexing Service on or off?

Tom

 

[technome]

A few posibilities...

Rarely is a server pegged out like this due to the disk subsystem unless due to a firmware bug on the disk or in the case of hardware raid, again the firmware, but this is very rare. Have you run any diags on the disk?

Could be SMB signing issues, I disable the signing during server setup

Network wiring not up to certified level can create enough errors on the wires to cause large delays in disk subsystems, seen this a number times. If you have managed switches check for error build up on each port.

Malware can cause this; seen this happen a few years back, with AOL incorrectly setup on laptops brought from home, delays created caused multiple server to peg-out.


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[JBruyet]

The Indexing Service isn't running on any of the servers having the disk access issue.

Thanks,

Joe B