[WinMac] NT/SFM CPU load follow-up

David A. Holter(holter[at]bethel.edu)
Fri, 06 Nov 1998 12:34:03 -0600

Thanks to Pam Buffington, Ethan Banks, Brian Bush, and Dave Sroelev for
your quick responses to my post. Here is some more info I should have
included in the initial post. The server has 256MB of RAM and a 267MB page
file. Disk 0 is a 4GB IDE w/ 2 2GB partitions. The OS and some
infrequently accessed applications are stored (and shared) on these two
partitions. The Home volume (where students save their files) is on Disk 1
(a 9GB U2W SCSI HD). Most of the Macs connecting to it are in a campus
lab, and are therefore quite active. I have Timesrv running on the server,
but as a process, it is using very little resources (and the drop off of
CPU activity with the lab closing leads me to believe that it is not the
culprit). I have IIS 3 installed and running www service for a single cgi
script which is accessed by one computer. I do not have proxy server
running on this system, nor is it print serving. I do have the post SP3
sfm-fix installed, but am holding off on SP4 until more experience is
gained with it. An interesting observation about the lab: it closes down
for a short time each day. When the lab closed today, the number of Mac
connections dropped to about 62, and the CPU freed up (ranging from 5% to
80% utilisation). I rebooted the system just before the lab opened, and
the CPU was back to about 95% to 100% when the first 30 lab users
connected. Most of these users were running Netscape, so I suspect that
therein lies our problem. We did cache to the student's pref folder on the
server until last week. Right now, we are not caching. We do not cache to
the local drive because some of our students have Macs in their dorm room
connected to our network (with hard drive names other than Macintosh HD),
and they would run into problems trying to launch their Netscape prefs to
access bookmarks and email. I had Visual Studio, Office97 and a couple of
other apps installed for console use, but I removed all of them this
morning prior to the restart (Find Fast was disabled at all times). Thanks
again for any help...

Dave

David A. Holter Bethel College
System Manager 3900 Bethel Dr. #2368
Academic Computing Services St. Paul, MN 55112
holter@bethel.edu (651)638-6277

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Fri Nov 06 1998 - 10:36:08 PST