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I have a windows 2003 server here which occasionally froze every couple of weeks.

Now it is happening every day. It has been hanging sometime during the night. How can I setup a running log of cpu/program/memory usage to see if there is a program or task which is causing it to freeze?

I thought it could have been the backup, but I can run a backup task during the day (writing to the tape drive) and it works without any issues.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be very appreciated.

Thanks

Mike

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2 Answers

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You use the term "freeze", which would imply that the machine is halting. In my experience, if you're not seeing a kernel STOP (a "blue screen") but rather are seeing something like, say, blank video or a static video display w/ no activity (and, in particular, no mouse pointer movement) then I'd be more suspicious of flaky hardware than of software.

If the machine doesn't have ECC memory I'd bring down a copy of MemTest86+ and give the RAM a thorough test.

If it does have ECC RAM (and you're not logging any memory errors) or it passes a few hours of MemTest86+ w/o error (for non-ECC RAM) I'd consider giving the box a few runs of the manufacturer's own diagnostics.

There's certainly a chance that it's not a hardware problem, but "freezing" in Windows, in my experience, has usually been hardware-related.

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The screen turns itself off after a certain amount of time. When I get back in the morning, no keyboard or mouse moments can wake it up. I've ran suppliers diagnostics on memory and it returned all fine. For all 6 sticks of RAM they all had: Multi-Bit Status=0,Single-Bit Threshold Count=0, Multi-Bit Status=No DIMM errors detected,Single-Bit Threshold Exceeded Status=No DIMM errors detected,Memory type=DDR2 SDRAM FB-DIMM – Mike Dec 7 '10 at 4:32
I haven't run a memtest on it, it is slightly more difficult to do this because its a production server without a slave – Mike Dec 7 '10 at 4:37
When you say it cant be woken up, I assume at this point all communication with the server halts also? – JamesK Dec 7 '10 at 10:30
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I had this same problem with one of my servers a few years ago. I wouldn't get any error logs indicating a problem. Event viewer was clean until I manually rebooted in the morning and it said "Previous shutdown was unexpected."

I swapped the Hard Drive, tested and swapped the RAM, swapped network cards. Nothing worked. Finally I took the original hard drive, put it into an identical server, and the crashes stopped. I could never replicate the problem, and every test came back clean.

I never figured out what the actual problem was, but the only options left were the motherboard and I guess the on board video card.

This is most likely a crucial hardware failure. Do you have a spare server you can failover to for a little while to test your hardware?

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That sounds exactly like the problem I have. I wish I had another server to use as failover for a while, however the other two servers are in production as well. The event viewer is clean also. Ugh :( – Mike Dec 7 '10 at 5:57
If you have bad hardware, you will eventually need to replace it. If the problem is justifying/proving this to someone else, maybe you can setup a regular desktop to run your application temporarily. Just to keep it running while you investigate the primary hardware issues, and then replace it if needed. – minamhere Dec 7 '10 at 12:40
Do you have a warranty? Maybe this is much simpler. – minamhere Dec 7 '10 at 12:41
Also, here was my original question on ServerFault. Maybe there are a few suggestions you can try that could at least lead you closer to identifying the problem. serverfault.com/questions/46511/… – minamhere Dec 7 '10 at 12:45
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