Can too much network transfer break a Windows Server 2008 machine?

I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine which has been having intermitted networking issues.

After 29 days, 14-ish hours uptime, I find it's not responding to RDP commands again, yet I can access it via terminal (iDRAC)

Wireshark didn't recognise any interface devices, yet I could ping out to network, but by all intents and purposes, the machine was dead to the world.

Then I checked the major network interface.

The Received bytes counter is literally overflowing the properties panel.

Is this possibly also meaning that the received bytes internally overflowed, causing network issues?

Is there a datatype limit to this value before windows, being the Enterprise(TM) Software(R) it is, falls over? The number I'm seeing here, assuming that it starts with 4,975.. and there are no more numbers in front, is larger than 2^42. Is this a hard limit?

edit: network connectivity is fine after restarting the server. Historically, it hasn't lasted 5 weeks without a reboot over the recent months.

edit: the newer sibling server, which does less traffic, is showing 12 significant figures of traffic, with 8 days uptime. I'd hazard a guess that the first visible digit in the Received Bytes listing (13 visible significant figures) is not the first significant digit in this value.

editedit: my network usage graphs is showing around 2^45 bytes transfer (once converted from megabits), so there's definitely an extra digit before the 4 that we can't see. My estimate from network usage is somewhere in the vicinity of 52 trillion bytes (52,000,000,000,000) over 29 days.

Solution 1:

The number being displayed will overflow but that won't stop the machine receiving data because the part that does the actual receiving doesn't keep count of the packets. That's just one of those pointless things the OS does for the benefit of us humans. Your RDP issue is unrelated to this. Has that service crashed perhaps?