🚀 go-pugleaf

We have a heavily specced Dell Poweredge server (dual 3GHz xeon CPU with 6GB RAM) running server 2003 Ent Edition (SP1), supporting around 80 terminal services users.

Our users use office/project and a variety of other apps (outlook, IE finance apps etc) and the server is heavily utilised.

The server has been freezing intermittently over the last 48 hours for periods of up to 10-15 mins (beyond most sysadmins level of patience I'm sure) and causing our users major stress.

Trying to pin point the root cause has been incredibly difficult as the server hosts sessions from 80 users spread across 8 sites - trying to co ordinate users on each site to enable us to establish if it's one user, one site, one PC that is causing the problem has been very difficult with people constantly trying to connect from all sites at once etc.

When the server freezes no errors are reported in the event log?

By watching the server console session with numerous windows open (task manager, perf mon, print Q's etc) we have seen the server freeze on more than one occasion when large PDF documents are printed? The printer driver isnt the issue as printing a word doc to the same printer is fine. I know PDF files are particularly large when spooling so I checked the printer spooler folder (full of .tmp files) which I cleaned out - problem remained. I have moved the spooler file to a larger drive and this doesnt appear to have made any difference either? Printing from any other app doesnt appear to cause an issue but large PDFs practically kill the server (and never used to).

The PDF print issue is so far the only way we have been able to replicate the problem and believe me we have looked at every other possible cause!

Has anyone else seen/experienced this strange behaviour?

Thanks

Paul