High kernel CPU usage

[Heinrich Moser]

Our Windows Server 2003 is quite slow recently and shows an unusual
lot of kernel CPU activity in Task Manager (the red line in the CPU
utilization graph). The server has more than enough RAM. Is there some
way to find out which (driver?) is causing this?

[NeilH]

Look in the task manager under processes. You will be able to see what is
taking the time.

[Heinrich Moser]

Well, it's not the "one process gone wild" type of problem. The CPU is
acutally mostly idle, but still the machine is extremely slow. I
thought that the fact that, *when* something is done, much time is
spent in kernel mode, could be an indication to the real problem
(probably a hardware problem, which is why I was curious about which
part of the kernel is involved in this).

Anything in the event logs? Any high network traffic? Any application
hogging lots of memory (or handles)?

[fregan]

i noticed the same thing on one of our servers this morning. the task manager only shows user mode processes, not what is using up kernel mode processes. still searching for answers on this one...

[alexei]

Hi, is this resolved?
May I know what hardware are you using? Do you have SATA ports that are enabled, but none are utilized?
My similar problem went away once I've connected SATA harddisks to the SATA ports... which led me to think that's it's the Intel driver.