Remote Desktop performance issues in Windows 2008
We're running an Application as a remote App using Remote Desktop on Windows server 2008, and we're getting situations where (after we've got about 40 people logged in) the server can freeze for a number of seconds (e.g. 20 seconds).
It doesn't look like the issue is caused by a lack of processor, or a lack of memory. The Application is quite disk heavy, but we've changed the drives from Raided SATA to a faster SSD Disk, and there has been no improvement.
The Application is a 32 bit App running in a 64 bit environment and 8GB of RAM.
The Application ran fine on RDP in Windows Server 2000 (up to 100 users) (Although it started to slow down as the server ran out of memory)
Looking at the Various Monitors, there is a peak in processor and network usage at the time of the freezes, although this seems to be more associated with the server catching its breath after it unfreezes.
We think it may be something to do with unloading/loading Hives as users log on, but this is a guess.
My questions are... - How do I find out what could be causing this error? - Anyone else experienced an issue like this - And how did you fix it?
Thanks.
In my experience, freezes are caused by either one of the following:
- A high disk queue length (i.e. more I/O than a harddisk can handle)
- Faulty drivers and firmware
- A very high amount of network traffic
- High memory or processor utilization
Notice that this is a list from most likely to least likely. I/O is very frequently a bottleneck. You can diagnose this using the performance monitor.
I've seen this and asked a related question (how-do-you-diagnose-a-server-temporarily-freezing).
Have a look at the following article. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934330, it may help, but I still don't know exactly what is going on.