Hi all,
We have a problem with our Windows 2003 servers. When we first installed this server everything went very well. The server was very stable and performant so we choose to implement Windows 2003. Apparently this was a big mistake because Windows server 2003 has a serieus performance issue with explorer. When adding more users to this server the system performance became terrible. After a while I noticed that the windows explorer takes a lot of the CPU without any reason. The left pane of the windows explorer flashes, like it's doing a refresh or someting. In fact when using network drives, the system is being notified about every change in these network drives (ex. when other people are copying files to this network drives). So a lot of traffic is transferred over the network and every explorer connected to these network shares will experience a flash. You can imagine that large networks where lots of people are working with network shares (in our network even "my computer" is redirected to a network shares) result in a lots of flickers. This flicker is not only annoying also CPU perfomance is hit by this issue. Imagine this: when you use this server as a terminal server, every explorer opened by a user will try to respond to network changes made by other users-> this is a nightmare for the CPU. When examining our performance logs we saw this is always happening at the same moment, so when 20 users have their explorer opened on this server total CPU-usage for the explorer-process is a sum of all the explorers of all the users toghether i.e. 20 times 4%6%8% ... depends on what windows wants at that time, on a rainy day more CPU on a sunny day less CPU ... Who will tell ;-) No seriously this is not funny at all, you invest a lot of work and mony in windows 2003, and as a result everything is now working much slower than ever before, using windows 2003 as terminal server you must have a 64CPU 4 GHz machine with 1 Terabyte Ram
to give your users a decent system, this is unacceptable.
My questions are:
1. Are there people having the same problems as we do?
2. Will there be a fix? XP had the same problem, MS had a registry fix I believe, changing the NoRemoteRecursiveEvents key in registry which btw doesn't fix all of the problem.
3. SMB (SMB FindFirstChangeNotification) had also something to do with it, is there sb who has found a workaround by disabling this SMB-traffic, without loosing your network drives off-course.
see "330929 Windows XP May Cause Extra SMB Notify Change Traffic" for more info
4. Has somebody already tried the pre-service pack 2 for XP, and does it work for windows 2003?
5. The one who finds a solution, I'll definitely buy a beer
Cheers
WIm
We have a problem with our Windows 2003 servers. When we first installed this server everything went very well. The server was very stable and performant so we choose to implement Windows 2003. Apparently this was a big mistake because Windows server 2003 has a serieus performance issue with explorer. When adding more users to this server the system performance became terrible. After a while I noticed that the windows explorer takes a lot of the CPU without any reason. The left pane of the windows explorer flashes, like it's doing a refresh or someting. In fact when using network drives, the system is being notified about every change in these network drives (ex. when other people are copying files to this network drives). So a lot of traffic is transferred over the network and every explorer connected to these network shares will experience a flash. You can imagine that large networks where lots of people are working with network shares (in our network even "my computer" is redirected to a network shares) result in a lots of flickers. This flicker is not only annoying also CPU perfomance is hit by this issue. Imagine this: when you use this server as a terminal server, every explorer opened by a user will try to respond to network changes made by other users-> this is a nightmare for the CPU. When examining our performance logs we saw this is always happening at the same moment, so when 20 users have their explorer opened on this server total CPU-usage for the explorer-process is a sum of all the explorers of all the users toghether i.e. 20 times 4%6%8% ... depends on what windows wants at that time, on a rainy day more CPU on a sunny day less CPU ... Who will tell ;-) No seriously this is not funny at all, you invest a lot of work and mony in windows 2003, and as a result everything is now working much slower than ever before, using windows 2003 as terminal server you must have a 64CPU 4 GHz machine with 1 Terabyte Ram
to give your users a decent system, this is unacceptable.My questions are:
1. Are there people having the same problems as we do?
2. Will there be a fix? XP had the same problem, MS had a registry fix I believe, changing the NoRemoteRecursiveEvents key in registry which btw doesn't fix all of the problem.
3. SMB (SMB FindFirstChangeNotification) had also something to do with it, is there sb who has found a workaround by disabling this SMB-traffic, without loosing your network drives off-course.
see "330929 Windows XP May Cause Extra SMB Notify Change Traffic" for more info
4. Has somebody already tried the pre-service pack 2 for XP, and does it work for windows 2003?
5. The one who finds a solution, I'll definitely buy a beer
Cheers
WIm
