[isalist] Re: ISA Server hardware requirements (cpu utilization problems)

  • From: Jerry Young <jerrygyoungii@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: isalist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 16:39:15 -0500

Mike,

Again, you're going to want to take a look at the web server, too, since
it's possible that it's what's bogging down.

Having said that, 1 GB of RAM seems a tad light.  While 80% CPU utilization
is high and you could probably benefit from adding another CPU to the box,
80% isn't necessarily indicative of a CPU bottleneck.  My first guess would
be that the system is lacking RAM and is then paging like crazy to disk.
While the SCSI disk subsystem is high speed, RAID 5 is slow among the RAID
brothers; you could look at changing from RAID 5 to RAID 10, but that would
require a reinstall, which you probably can't do.

You can start by playing with the Windows Server 2003 Performance Advisor
from Microsoft.  That can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09115420-8c9d-46b9-a9a5-9bffcd237da2&DisplayLang=en

For reference material on performance monitoring in general, and how you can
use it to troubleshoot performance issues check out
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/performance/tuning.mspx
.

For specific counters you can look at, take a peek at
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc779038(WS.10).aspx.

There's really no one shot solution to this, unfortunately.  With a bit of
time and some investigation, though, you'll be able to determine the real
culprit.

But again, also check the performance of your web servers.

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Mike Anderson <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>  Hello All!
>
>
>
> If ISA Server is given the proper hardware to run on top of, it should be
> able to keep up with any amount of traffic thrown at it correct?
>
>
>
> Our sports fishing website has some very specific peak times, where
> visitors will come to “do their thing” and in the process, just pound our
> website to death.  During these peak times, our CPU utilization will hover
> at around 80% or higher and things will just be terribly slow for everybody
> thereafter.  Right now, we have 2,300 sessions running & it’s one of our
> peak times.  If there is anything else I can provide to you, that would help
> you determine whether this machine is underpowered for the amount of traffic
> we must manage, please let me know and I’ll track it down for you.
>
>
>
> For machine specific information, we are running a dual-processor capable
> Xeon system (with a single processor at the moment) with 1 gig RAM and a
> high speed SCSI-based RAID 5 disk subsystem.  As for the software, we are
> running Windows Server 2003 sp2 (32-bit) and ISA Server 2004 (with most
> recent service pack).
>
>
>
> Thanks in advance for any help you can offer,
>
>
>
> Mike
>
>
>



-- 
Cordially yours,
Jerry G. Young II
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer

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