Member Avatar for Slammin Sammy

Hi,

I'm not sure this is the place to ask this question, but I'm at wit's end, so here goes:

I manage a small network based around Windows Small Business Server 2003, with about a dozen users logged on to the domain each day. All of these are local, as I haven't yet established a VPN or other way to log in remotely. The server is used mostly for file and print serving, and I haven't even set up an Exchange server as yet.

Every afternoon about 4:30 to 5:00, access to the server becomes painfully slow. Trying to access files across the network is like pulling teeth, and soemetimes just hangs.

Sometimes it effects some users, and sometimes all users. I have looked at the reports, but I can't find a process or event at that time that may be the cause. Does anyone have an idea as to where I should begin to look?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

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Generated

The slowdown described by (SBS 2003, ~12 users, HP 16‑port switch, daily 4:30–5:00pm) is very often caused by a predictable, scheduled spike rather than random user activity. Common culprits are scheduled backups or antivirus scans, server-side maintenance (defrag, indexing), AD/DFS/replication tasks, failing disk I/O, or a network problem (duplex mismatch, port errors, or switch flaps). This complements ’s point about hardware/infrastructure and ’s about backups/AV — both lines of inquiry should be pursued in parallel.

Capture a reproducible trace across the event window (start logging 15–30 minutes before 16:30 and stop 30–60 minutes after). Useful PerfMon counters: Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time, System\Processor Queue Length, PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Avg. Disk sec/Transfer, PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Avg. Disk Queue Length, Network Interface(*)\Bytes Total/sec, Memory\Available MBytes, NTFS\File Reads/sec and File Writes/sec. Quick examples to collect data from the server:

typeperf "\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time" "\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Avg. Disk sec/Transfer" "\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Total/sec" -si 5 -o C:\Temp\trace_1630.csv

netstat -ano > C:\Temp\netstat_1630.txt

Interpretation notes and checks: sustained high disk latency (Avg. Disk sec/Transfer rising into the tens of ms and high disk queue length) points to backups/AV/drive problems — check NTBackup/SBS backup logs, AV scheduled tasks, and SMART/chkdsk. High network throughput with interface errors suggests duplex/mismatch or switch problems — inspect the HP switch port stats (errors, collisions, flapping) and confirm NIC speed/duplex on the server. High CPU shows the offending process in Process Explorer/Task Manager. Also review Event Viewer and Scheduled Tasks for jobs that start near 16:30.

Practical mitigations: reschedule heavy jobs to after hours, stagger client-side tasks, update NIC drivers/firmware, offload large shares to a dedicated volume/RAID, and enable logging so vendor support can analyse the PerfMon/ProcMon/netstat captures if needed. Collecting a short ProcMon trace and the PerfMon CSV for the next occurrence will usually expose the root cause.

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Member Avatar for extofer

Perhaps there is a demand at that time from your users. What is your infrustructure like? is is just a hub or switch for twelse users. If there is some demand, why not departmentalize switched and routers.... what's your hardware like??

Member Avatar for Slammin Sammy

Perhaps there is a demand at that time from your users. What is your infrustructure like? is is just a hub or switch for twelse users. If there is some demand, why not departmentalize switched and routers.... what's your hardware like??

Good question, but I don't think that's the issue. Demand doesn't seem any different (it will happen whether there's one person or five on the network). Also, we're running through an HP switch (16 port).

Thanks for the response.

Member Avatar for knsljo

I think you will find that everyone is packing up to go home and will all be frantically saving their work to the server.:cheesy::-| This will slow it down.

Have you got backups scheduled or any virus scans at this time of day on the server?

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