We have been dogged by Server 2003 "locking up" from time to time since we moved from OLD linux servers to the new machines. It appears that the I/O waits go through the roof a few times a day and everyone gets hung until the O/S can get around to clearing it. Overall everyone reports better responsiveness from the new server, except when it gets clogged up with this I/O backlog.
We're unsure of how to solve it though. We only have 16 users hitting this server, and there's only 8GB of space used across its drives (RAID 10, all 15K drives). Performance counters for disk/network/memory/cpu are all close to 0 ... except for the average disk queue length, which shoots up at the same time that users complain.
In Linux, load averages would never go above 2 or 3, while now the queue length will sometimes shoot up to 10 or 12 even though we have faster drives, more drives, more memory, more cores, same exact application hitting the server, etc.
First question - any suggestions for what we can do to track down and resolve this?
Second question - is there a way to create a logical disk drive in memory (then just DFS Replicate it with a physical hard drive or even write scripts to replicate it from our app)? The whole data drive is only 8GB (and the server supports 48GB of memory), but I'm not sure how to handle this.