Once in a while, one of my Windows 2003 servers suffers from some kind of misbehaving application that eats all resources and forces the server to hang/crash. It usually begins with users complaining that the network is slow, or some DFS share cannot be accessed anymore.
I never really investigated this problem, just a quick reboot to keep my users happy, and that’s it.
Last week, it happened again. Just when I was on vacation. Since I’m the only IT guy in this company, nobody knew what was happening. We have a support contract with a third party, so things got resolved pretty quickly, but now this problem has to be dealt with.
Time to dig deeper into memory/resource management on Windows. I found this article on the MSDN debugging blog. I’ll see if this can help me find the culprit.
If I still can’t find the problem, it might be an option to reboot the server every weekend. See how you can schedule a reboot in this article at Intelliadmin.
Let the hunt begin !
Update 08/10/07
I think I may have found the culprit: McAfee Virusscan Enterprise 8.0. The McAfee Framework service is eating all resources. My server crashed again a few weeks ago, and after the reboot I disabled all McAfee stuff. Since then, everything is still running smoothly. If the problems stay away for a couple of more weeks, I will look for another antivirus solution, since I have been having troubles with desktop installations of this product as well…
