Coming home, I turned the server back on and began implementing an idea I had during the day: Write a small utility that would reboot the server as soon as memory load went above 66%.
This is unthinkable for a server OS, but in my case, I expect an uptime increase of at least 300% - 400%.
I then decided to listen to some music. About 1 minute into the song, silence.
Several seconds later, another second of the song player, then silence again.
I tried to browse to the folder (using my remote desktop connection), the explorer window hung. Couldn’t kill explorer.exe. Had to push the reset button again.
After rebooting, PPPoE dialin failed. Then failed again. Then was automatically attempted and failed. Then succeeded.
Now I have full speed and no transmission errors. I’m curious what might cause such a hickup.
What does one have to do to install a server, go away and find it running the next time he returns?
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Sounds like you are having some really bad luck. Perhaps drivers or something. For my Home Server (rather then pro server I guess) I’ve had to use compatability drivers because my motherboard’s updated ones seem to screw things up.
I have a Asrock P4VM900 Socket 478 and it’s disk drivers give me hassle. I would def recommend soft raid over hardware raid, just because software raid will work regardless of what motherboard / controller you use. Some RAID implementations aren’t even compatiable over different versions of the same controller!
As for the torrents, well I have had my clients gobble up handles etc, rather then just memory. So might be best to either use a better task manager or see more columns to make sure they aren’t doing something else undesirable.
Good luck anyway. Perhaps Gentoo will work out for you.
A full server at home though huh? Guess you must have an MSDN subscription or something
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:59 pm
I’m using an Asus K8N-E Deluxe (NForce 4 Ultra) with the WHQL drivers either from the Windows Server 2008 DVD or windows update. Software RAID-5 with 3 disks, no problems, even when I was using Windows Server 2008 Beta3.
Nope, don’t have an MSDN subscription, for most of 2007, I was running Beta3 of Windows Server 2008 and I’m currently running the trial of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise. I was thinking about shelling out the money for Windows Server 2008 Standard, but if I had to decide right now, Windows would go out the window
The memory load issues are indeed directly related to running BitTorrent. It’s just that I cannot believe that a mere memory hog can bring down the mighty Windows Server 2008.
I checked all Columns in task manager and there’s no process that uses excessive amounts of memory. When I quit the BitTorrent client, the memory load stops growing, but doesn’t go down again (I checked that the process has really ended). To my understanding, when the process terminates, Windows should free all open handles.