Bugzilla – Bug 16417
7.6 has periodic hangs if a SC 7.3.3 server is on the same network
Last modified: 2011-05-12 14:20:15 UTC
I'm seeing a strange issue: My SBS 7.6 beta has periodic hangs (every about two minutes for about 20-30s each) whenever I run an old SC 7.3.3 server on the same network. The phenomenon completely goes away as soon as I shut down the 7.3.3 server and immediately comes back as soon as I start it again. I earlier attributed this to authentication on the 7.3.3 but it stays that way if I turn authentication off, only shutting down the 7.3.3 server helps.
Update: This is a) not limited to 7.3.3 but applies to _any_ other server on the same network and b) seems to be only _one_ element causing the hangs. What I see is that there are a number of things having an impact on the server performance, notably this, some plugins (TrackStat, CustomBrowse) and also what kind of players I have connected to the network (SP players seem to cause more trouble), whether I sync players and whether a player updates SW. What I believe happens is that my server, being not the fastest one around runs into some kind of race condition because too many things behave badly WRT multitasking. In the logs I see a lot of activities (the ones mentioned above) that can take >>1s between log entries (at high logging level I usually have >>1 log file entry per second!. Now I believe that a lot of periodic activities of this kind simply eat up too much time to allow the scheduler to assign a time slot making the whole server hang. It seems to be an issue internal to SBS since other processes on the same machine are unaffected and the overall load is actually quite low (single digit percentages at "top"). So I believe for low-powered machines you should have a look at the architecture to avoid that kind of lockups, after all, while my ViaC7 @1.5GHz is not the fastest server around it's still much, much faster compared to the likes of a ReadyNAS or Synology.
FYI: I currently don't see this anymore
Thanks.