High Avg. Disk Queue Length in Performance Monitor

[Rich]

Hi Everyone,

We have a web server set up running a single web site. The web site
accesses a database on a seperate server. The web server has Windows Server
2003 SP1 installed and has 2GB of RAM. We experienced a couple of timeout
exceptions on the site yesterday so I started looking at the performance of
the web server. I am not sure that this is responsible for the timeouts we
are experiencing but I noticed that the Avg. Disk Queue Length in the
performance monitor was up around the 2000 (with the maximum being somewhere
around 26000).

Having had a look around the web it seems that the average should be around
2? On the database server this is the case. Can anyone suggest why this
value would be so high?

We have tried stopping the website and associated services but this didn't
effect this value. We have also tried using RAMBooster to clear down the
current RAM but it quickly returns to its previous state. Again, this made
no difference to the number of writes to the disk.

There is around 1.3GB of available RAM although this value does not
fluctuate at all.

Can anyone make any suggestions on what might be causing this or what steps
I can take to identify the problem? I am extremely new to the server
management process.

Many Thanks

Rich

[bg]

On Mar 13, 5:10 am, Rich <R...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> We have a web server set up running a single web site. The web site
> accesses a database on a seperate server. The web server has Windows Server
> 2003 SP1 installed and has 2GB of RAM. We experienced a couple of timeout
> exceptions on the site yesterday so I started looking at the performance of
> the web server. I am not sure that this is responsible for the timeouts we
> are experiencing but I noticed that the Avg. Disk Queue Length in the
> performance monitor was up around the 2000 (with the maximum being somewhere
> around 26000).
>
> Having had a look around the web it seems that the average should be around
> 2? On the database server this is the case. Can anyone suggest why this
> value would be so high?
>
> We have tried stopping the website and associated services but this didn't
> effect this value. We have also tried using RAMBooster to clear down the
> current RAM but it quickly returns to its previous state. Again, this made
> no difference to the number of writes to the disk.
>
> There is around 1.3GB of available RAM although this value does not
> fluctuate at all.
>
> Can anyone make any suggestions on what might be causing this or what steps
> I can take to identify the problem? I am extremely new to the server
> management process.
>
> Many Thanks
>
> Rich

What type of timeout was it? Could it have been a result of a
database issue? What type of content are you expedting from the
database server?
What type of hardware are you running on the web server?

What is the value of % Disk Time?