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Hey all, plase bear with me as I haven't looked at a server in a very long time.

The problem I am having is with a Windows 2008 Standard FE Service Pack 2

Intel Xeon X3430 @ 2.40 2.39 GHZ
4 GB Memory
64 Bit

There seems to be no problems other than the physical memory peaking at 91%, always with over 100 Hard Faults Per Second.

To my understanding hard faults should be fairly rare on a machine with.

Are there any logs I can show you? Or investigate myself.

The general performance of the machine is ok, i can access SBS2008 and change settings fairly smoothly without hangs etc. However, we connect to the server and do quite a bit of SQL via an application. For a record to retrieve say 20 rows, it can take 20+ seconds.

Thanks in advance, Jamie

EDIT:

What the server is used for:

  • IIS ASP Web Service
  • SQL 2008
  • List item
  • Exchange

unable to upload screenshots due to low reputation - why doesnt my SO work here :)

enter image description here

enter image description here

Mark Henderson
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JS1986
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    For the record, 4Gb is the bare minimum I would consider running SBS2008 on. We had a server that started with 4Gb, after 3 months we'd gone and bumped it up to 8Gb. 6 Months after that we bumped it up to 16Gb and now it seems happy. – Mark Henderson Mar 15 '11 at 23:30
  • wow really? i need to kick the tech in the balls! – JS1986 Mar 15 '11 at 23:46
  • @Claw - well, before going that far, there may be other reasons it's being RAM starved. Budget issues, availability, priorities, etc. – Mark Henderson Mar 15 '11 at 23:49
  • Please take a screenshot, just like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2618406/asp-net-performance-100-memory-hard-faults-indiciate-a-memory-swapping-problem We need more information on the processes running to see where the memory leak is. Sounds to me like SQL server is being choked. Is this server ONLY SQL server or is there an IIS process running on it? Please clarify the scope of this server. – IT_Fixr Mar 15 '11 at 23:53
  • @IT+Fixr I have uploaded a few images to IMGUR please see OP edit – JS1986 Mar 16 '11 at 00:06
  • Also please comment on timeline. Is this something that's happened all of a sudden or been going on a while. On SBS2008 and 2011, a RAM-starved system will often only be noticeable on slow SQL queries or slow SharePoint, as Exchange clients (outlook) buffer data so it's not as apparent that the server is slow. 4GB ram is low. RAM is so cheap I'd take the box to the max likely 12-24GB based on age. Check with HW vendor obviously. With SBS2011 even 8GB as starting RAM is minimum unless you only have ~5 users. – Bret Fisher Mar 16 '11 at 00:07
  • As Mark said, 4GB is minimum, 6-8GB recommended by Microsoft http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc527594(WS.10).aspx – Bret Fisher Mar 16 '11 at 00:07
  • Thanks for the heads up guys. The problem has been on going for a while, I've decided to take matter into my own hands by checking the server. I am a developer(so sorry for my ignorance). I invoke the webservice on this machine, it has always been slow. But as @Bret Fisher mentioned...I only notice the slow performance when doing a SQL (via webservice) – JS1986 Mar 16 '11 at 00:10
  • Your other resources (disk I/O, CPU, network) look fine but memory hard faults could be an issue. I'm not a hard fault expert but 10 a min by the SQL service doesn't seem like a lot. Are those pictures taken while your waiting on SQL queries to finish? – Bret Fisher Mar 16 '11 at 16:14
  • @Bret taken while doing nothing at all. – JS1986 Mar 16 '11 at 23:05
  • @claw if you have more than 200 reputation at any stackexchange site, you automatically get 100 on new stackexchange sites you join. at this time, you only have 167 on stackoverflow. – longneck Jul 25 '12 at 14:11

1 Answers1

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So without more diag and troubleshooting I would say your best bet is to (at least) double the RAM from 4 to 8GB per Microsoft recommendations, which will allow more room for SQL to store table data in RAM.

You'll notice by your Commit column in the screenshots that the other busy services with lots of RAM activity are Exchange and Exchange Edge Svc (which you may be able to disable that service if you don't have an exch edge server). it also looks like you have two SQL server instances running, which I think is the norm for SBS.

You can look in Performance Monitor for Physical Disk "Avg. Disk Queue Length" which shouldn't be more then 1-2 times the number of physical disks... which if it is will tell you the server needs more disk I/O (more disks) but that could be a red herring, as when you are low on RAM then the server is forced to use more disk in the paging file. Adding RAM will reduce the use of disk as "pretend RAM" and make everything from logons to SQL and Exchange snappier in my experience.

Bret Fisher
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