Server issues ...

[Hangman]

Hey guys,
This is sort of a long shot, but I figured I'd ask anyways, I don't know where else to go or anything else to do.

Here's the issue. We have MS Small Business Server 2003 with Exchange. We are having problems with pausing and hesitating quite frequently. Our machines will just pause for 10 to 20 seconds at a time on average, with our longest pause at around 1 minute. We have looked at the applications running, the tasks, everything we can think of. We can't find what is causing the server to go search the network for something.
When we are running MCM2 (roughly 12 players on Motocross Madness) we get a really bad jiggy screen. The FPS drops to about 4 for roughly 30 seconds. This is a random thing too, one day it hits one machine, then another. Another day, it hits two or three machines at the same time. We haven't noticed it hit the same machine day after day faithfully though, but it will hit the same machine for two days, then skip the machine for a day, then hit it again the next day.

Do you guys have any idea what we could possibly look for ??
Do you guys know of a program we can use to watch for this activity that we may be able to find the culprit ??
Do you guys have any ideas you could throw my way in terms of diagnosing this ??

Thanks.

 

[DelJo63]

investigate overheating. vacuum the inards and be sure to clean the entry
exit ports.

post your hardware mfg/model and specs

 

[Hangman]

The server's brand new, roughly 3 months old.
It's a dell.
The specs are in PDF format, uploaded for your viewing pleasure.
It's the 2900_specs.pdf file.
It's basically bare bones, we haven't loaded any custom programs or anything overburdening on the system. Mainly just data files.

I'm wondering if the new server is requesting something from the individual machines connected to it that is causing the machines to pause while it searches or passes info to the server.
The machines have a gig network card and the server does as well. What we do have in question is the lines from the stations to the server. We don't know if they are cat5 or cat5e or cat6.
Could we have a bottleneck happening with the lines ??
But we didn't have the problem with the old server, but it had the slower meg nic cards in it.

In the Administrative Tools, Component Services, Event Viewer on the individual machines, there is nothing there in terms of Warnings or Errors to guide me to any conclusion.

I'm stumped on this one, but these pauses are getting really irritating.

Thank you for your help.

 

[DelJo63]

read this regarding DMA vs PIO

also disable all AUTOUPDATE features for all software. On a server, YOU want
to control when updates are applied.

install Cports.exe
and monitor the traffic when the stall occurs.
Click on the column heading Remote Port twice to make it a descending list.
NEW ports opened will be at the TOP and you can see what is being accessed.

you can also use the Task Mgr to monitor processes or Network at the same time.

The the first question is "What is going on" and then "Why".