Troubleshooting a Slow Notification Server Console

SQL and Altiris Products! They go together.... (Not singing that song). But they need to be configured correctly, or you can run into the dreaded slow console, or even worse, data loss.

In troubleshooting a slow console, one area you might consider is the I/O channels on the SQL server, specifically the Network Interface Card. One Altiris user recently discovered that his dedicated SQL server was the bottleneck in his management environment.

His SQL server was using 1 NIC to provide all connection to the rest of the world, including connecting to an ISCSI drive array. By only having one NIC for ALL THAT TRAFFIC, the Notification Server was bound to appear slow, since it could not access it's database data as fast as necessary. The problem extended so far as to cause package codebase creation to fail, thus essentially stopping his ability to deliver packages to the managed clients.

So,

Make sure when troubleshooting a slow console you assure that you have plenty of Disk and LAN I/O available and that you are not holding up the flow by constricting it all thru one path. SAN drive arrays, with dedicated Host Bus Adapters (HBA's), or Local Disk Arrays on dedicated controllers, or even multiple drives (for small environments, and a NIC card for traditional, normal, network traffic will make all the difference.