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One of our servers has been leaking PID like crazy. I wrote a simple scheduled script, and it seems that every day the highest PID increases by approx. 300'000. E.g., if on Aug.24 00:00 the highest PID is 50'796, on Aug.25 00:00 the highest PID is 345'899, on Aug.26 00:00 the highest PID is 655'241, and so on.

If the server is left on for more than one week, then sometimes during the 10th ~ 12h day, the server will hang, we can access it no longer via RDP. At such situation, we would have to power cycle the server because it simply refuses to acknowledge any remote commands.

So, I've written a simple script to ensure orderly shutdown and restart of the server; every Tuesday at 02:00 the script fires and rebooted the system. Now we no longer experience a system lockout, but of course the root cause is not fixed.

What tool(s) do you recommend to troubleshoot this problem?

More Info: The server was originally running without problems physically. Then it got migrated to the regional datacenter using P2V operation, now running on top of VMware. The 'heavyweight' application in it would be Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise.

pepoluan
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Sounds like you might have a process constantly spawning a sub-process, which then fails. I'd recommend using SysInternals (Microsoft's) ProcessMonitor (here) - it really is the dog's danglies when it comes to nailing problems like this.

Simon Catlin
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