Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Server Blues

So the new server box is giving me issues (after being perfectly stable as a workstation). One symptom is that when I copy a few gigs of data from the hard drive to the USB drive, performance slowly falls to nothing (over the course of about 15 minutes). Performance also gets really wierd, the machine will seemingly hang for 10-30 seconds (some windows work, most refuse to update or work). Then I get the following event in my event log:

Event ID: 9, Source: atapi, The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort1, did not respond within the timeout period.

Some background about the system. I'm running an Asus A7V266-E motherboard with a built-in Promise FastTrak100 Lite RAID1 controller, hooked to a pair of ATA/133 5400rpm Maxtor drives. I also have an Adaptec 3100LP USB 2.0 PCI card with 3 external ports (and 1 internal port). An Adaptec PCI-SCSI card (AHA-2930CU), a Netgear PCI 10/100 ethernet card and a 3com 10/100 ethernet card. (Which means I'm just about out of PCI slots!) Also running a GeForce3 MX400 AGP video card. I have a SCSI CDRW burner, a SCSI Exabyte 8505 tape drive, a SCSI Iomega ZIP100 drive and a IDE CD-ROM.

All of which is a lot of equipment to try and get running on the first go round. (Smarter folks then me tend to start with the minimum amount of hardware installed and then add on...)

I'm still troubleshooting, but at the moment, I've pulled the Netgear ethernet card, the Adaptec SCSI card, pulled the power plugs on the SCSI devices, and moved the PCI-USB controller card to the last PCI slot (it was in the number one slot). Now I'm copying a few gigs from the hard drive to the USB drive to see if the problem has gone away. I'm pretty sure that moving the PCI-USB card to a different PCI slot is the key thing, but I won't know until I've added back in the rest of the devices.

Update #1: So far, it's been running hard for over an hour (copying files and zipping up 6 directories at the same time). Using a performance monitor interval of 144 sec (4 hrs of duration), the system is processing 3.6 Mb/sec on/off the physical disks. This might seem low, but since it's currently CPU-bound by the WinZip program, it's not that bad. (Bad performance is anything under 1.5Mb/sec, good performance would be 6-8Mb/sec.)

Update #2: It's been a few hours now, I've dropped all of the SCSI devices back in (only thing not re-installed is the 2nd NIC, but I won't put that back in until I setup the isolated wireless segment). Moving the USB-PCI card down to the last slot seems to have done the trick.

posted by Wuphon's at 2:33 PM