Server Crashes with BugCheck 4E on HTTP.sys

Clint,
How many nodes are you managing?  We have ~15,000 on our NS (same versions as you) and haven't run into this.  Do you have package servers, or do clients download all packages from the NS? If they do, I might stand up at least one PS to take some of the load off.  Also to be clear, that throttle isn't across the board for all machines; that is 10kbit per client if the network speed is < 30kbit.  It could be additional overhead of how frequently the agents are "speed testing" their connection to the NS; I think by default it occurs much too frequently (like every 5 minutes or something?)  This can be adjusted in the NS Configurator.  I'll look up the setting if you need it.   What hardware is your NS running on?  Do you have IIS throttling in place as well, or only in Altiris?

I'm managing about 3800 nodes via a single Dell PowerEdge 2650 server with 4 GB memory running W2k3 and SQL 2000.  I don't have any package servers defined and think I'd need quite a few since we have multiple sites with slow links.  I'll look into this option.  Anyhow, can you please tell me where to adjust that "speed testing" value?  Might be worth increasing.

Also, I don't have IIS throttling enabled and was only playing around with Altiris' bandwidth throttling feature which I have since turned off.  To help out our remote sites, my network guys have imposed a rate limit on their switches for all Altiris (and SEP) server traffic which accounts for most of the network utilization spikes in our environment.  Unfortunately Altiris Tech Support wasn't able to find a definitive cause of my server crash.  Since all of the crash dumps pointed to HTTP.sys, do you think IIS throttling would've helped?  I'm thinking the bandwidth throttling change innundated IIS which, in turn, crashed my server.

Anyhow, let me know about my questions because I've got no solid leads to troubleshoot this issue.  Thanks again!

First you have to install the "NS Configurator".  The install should be in C:\Program Files\Altiris\Diagnostics, named NSConfigurator.msi.  It will add an option in your programs > altiris > tools or something folder on the start menu.  You can disable Agent codebase speed tests by setting the "SpeedTestCodebases" value to 0 at Core Settings > Get Package Info Settings within the NS Configuration.  I might also set the "GenerateNSUNCPackageCodebases" to 1 and the HTTPCodebases to 0, which should help take some of the load off of IIS on your box.

As for Package Servers, you don't need to invest in anything high-end for a smallish site with 50 or so nodes.  We have about 90 WindowsXP boxes running as package servers at most of our small sites and htey work fine.  Larger sites with 100+ machines would probably be advisable to have package servers.  You can even use Linux boxes with Apache, but I haven't tried that configuration.