Server suddenly stops processing tasks and becomes unusable

Question

At my place of work, we have 4x Windows Server 2003 Terminal Servers, and lately one of them has been very crash prone.

Upon investigation, I can see that for some reason it just stops processing requests. For example, there were approximately 15 people logged on to the server this morning, and all of a sudden I was getting calls about the server 'freezing'.

In the image below, you can see that there are multiple instances of Outlook.exe running (which is to be expected), but that the CPU usage is 0%.

In the performance tab, the same is evident of the CPU usage, and the PF usage is at around 3.2GB (4GB of RAM installed).

When the server does this, I cannot do anything. Processes will not end (or start), and I cannot even restart the server (I have to forcefully power it off).

For virus protection, we use ESet Nod 32, and it reads that the server is fully protected.

Has anyone ever experienced problems like this before? What could be causing this issue? Thanks.

Answer 1

I have seen this behavior in other server software where nod32 is installed (as well as random crashes). This included all version of the software up and including 5.0.x.

Disabling the real-time scanning component solved the issue for us. ESET support wasn't able to help us in any other way. We have not however, updated or tested version 6 so maybe it does fix it.

In any case, I encourage you to get into contact with ESET support.