| Subject: Re: Slow turnaround of unit |
| From: raj@rijhwani.org (Raj Rijhwani) |
| Date: 10/01/2004, 18:17 |
On Friday, in article <OBiiysRsdp$$EA8O@unseen.demon.co.uk>
tpratchett@unseen.demon.co.uk "Terry Pratchett" wrote:
Since the beginning of January the (theoretically) fasted machine in my
network, a 2.2 Ghz P4, has been turning around units in 15-20 hours.
It's running the graphical version under XP
This is as opposed to a 4-5hr turnaround on another machine, the1.8
Ghz P4 running the CLI). It's slower even than the old 450Mhz P2! I
didn't worry at first because all the machines get the occasional big
one, but *every* unit take the better part of a day now. 4-6 hours per
unit was the norm until the end of the December.
No new software has been put on the machine, no specs have been altered,
and in every other respect it appears to be working fast and
efficiently. Can anyone give me a clue about what might be happening?
1) Any exposure to the outside world? (Possible infection or attack.)
2) You may not have changed anything, but the "beginning of January"
is a red flag. Are you running something that schedules an annual task
on or around New Year? (Process stuck/deadlocked/in a permanent run state.)
3) Don't know XP, but if there is any means of examining resource usage,
it would be wise to see what's
a) eating the most memory
b) eating the most processor time
Is the (hard) disk access very high? If something has overflowed available
memory and is causing a lot of paging, this would slow you down immensely
because access times are now dependent not on RAM access times but disk
access times. Usual culprits are growing databases, indexes, mail spools
or print spools.
Just a few suggestions.