2008 TS lag or pause, in the Terminal Services forum on BrianMadden.com

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mick1978 Posted: Thu, Mar 4 2010 7:08 AM

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I am experiencing the following issues and hope someone can help. I have raised a support ticket with Microsoft and they haven't been too helpful thus far.

• When a user types characters in a document, characters do not appear on the screen until this lag has ended.
• Keyboard input and mouse input are queued, but they are not processed until this pause has ended.
• Live performance monitoring (Perfmon) graphs have missing data points during this pause.
• All running programs appear to stop responding, or"hang," during this pause.

Hardware information is below:

Servers: 5 x HP BL460C and 1 x HP DL360 G5
CPU: 2 x 2.66 GHz Quad Core
RAM: 24GB and 8 GB respectively
HDD: 2 x 72GB in RAID1

Software Information:

Server 2008 Standard 64-bit with SP2
Office 2007 SP2
Acrobat Reader 9
Java Run Time
Adobe Plugins
Some custom IE and Access applications
Numerous HP Printer drivers (about 20)
HP Drivers and Utilities e.g. HP PSP

These servers are newly built and on average have about 20 users on them. The lag or pause happens randomly throughout the day regardless of the number of users on the box. There could be 2 users and still experience the lags/delays.

I have checked CPU/Mem/Disk/Network IO using perfmon and nothing certainly appears to be a bottleneck. The symptoms appear very similar to those outlined in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324446 although this article applies only to Windows Server 2000 and 2003.

Users access these TS using the RDP client which I think is version 6 on Windows XP SP3.

Any help greatly appreciated...

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EmilBeck replied on Tue, Mar 9 2010 7:07 AM

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The fact that perfmon also paused suggest to me a hardware fault, but you have two different servers.  Did you try the DskCache tool?

 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811392

Also I always recomment write caching on TS servers (with battery backup).

Any metrics that are interesting in the perfmon Page/Sec-1 or Disk queue?

--Emil

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mick1978 replied on Thu, Mar 18 2010 1:40 AM

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The problem was due to the absence of a write cache like you suggested. Disk idle under perfmon was really low. Installing and configuring a write cache keeps disk idle really high and as a result user lags are no longer apparent.

Thanks for all your help.