Off Topic: PC That Takes Breaks for About 1 Second

[hucker]

PC Expert Question

This is not HA related though I could spin in so it was

At work we have a high end, quad core work station, loaded up with RAM, runing XPSP2. This PC controls a laser scanning system. It really doesn't do much during the scanning process (the heavy lifting happens processing the data). On one installation we see the machine stop work for a second or so, sometimes it repeats this behavior a few times in a row. This causes us to loose data. We never saw before it shipped and back in the day this all ran on single core 1GHz machines and had pretty low CPU loading. Our FAE's are pretty good about verifying that no unexpected services have been installed. Right now they are comparing our logs to the event log to see if they can find the problem.

We could run procmon to see if we can capture data to prove it, but to do so would require a gotomypc connection and procmon which might not be a great test.

Any wisdom on the causes of such delays?

Thanks.

 

[MarcDencker]

check the event log for errors or warnings (system and application)

I have seen this happen when the disk was starting to crap out.
make sure all your drivers are up-to-date
compare a processlist (just use taskmgr) with a machine that doesnt have this isseu to get a quick comparison of the difference

take a look here for tools that help you to do this remotely if needed: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...c84cb9e2f5.aspx

 

[mustangcoupe]

maybe ram failure?

 

[tmbrown97]

I have seen this happen when the disk was starting to crap out.

I too have seen a few issues where you spend way too much time troubleshooting a PC that's freezing up... no other explanation whatsoever - ghost that drive to a brand new one, and never have an issue again. If the PC is waiting for a response from the drive, it'll totally freeze the PC.

With how cheap hard-drives are these days, once the due diligence is done, that's worth checking as well...

In the mean time, another great tool for seeing what's running on fresh boot is hijackthis - once you're familiar with it, it's extremely useful.

 

[beelzerob]

Is it an Intel machine, or AMD? I had a very annoying issue with stuttering HD playback on my AMD machine due to their flexible clockspeed/power management thing. Once I disabled that, the stuttering went away.

 

[Michael McSharry]

How about a RAID array where retry/recovery is occurring on a bad segment of a platter.