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