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WS2012E Dashboard Responsiveness with Scanner Scanning


kihimcarr

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Is it normal for the Windows Server 2012 Essentials Dashboard to become extremely slow and in some cases unresponsive when Scanner is scanning drives? Currently Scanner is checking the health of two drives simultaneously that are connected to separate SAS controllers. I am running the latest stable release of Scanner.

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Just to follow up on this,

 

I've done extensive troubleshooting on this issue with Kihim in a support ticket. It seems like this is caused by the system getting bogged down at certain times leading to a periodic slowdown in the UI. At least that's what I can see from the Scanner's built-in UI performance profiler (accessed by pressing P in a BETA build).

 

I don't see any Scanner UI task running away with the CPU. I've also set up a local test rig with similar specs, 26 disks and a 2Ghz 8-core AMD server, and have run the Scanner UI for hours looking for any slowdowns and I couldn't find any.
 

But I think the bottom line here is that the Scanner uses WPF to render its UI, and WPF does require some more CPU resources than your typical Win32 application. I think that that's really the core issue here. So in the future I would like to offer a "lite" version of the UI for situations where CPU resources are scarce. I imagine that there will be a simple drop down that will let you switch between "standard" and "lite" versions of the UI, letting you run whichever one you want.

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Yes. Alex was very helpful and diligent in his assistance. But, just to update you on some of my testing so far. I don't believe it is my CPU power at all because my colleague has the exact same system setup and he does not have this issue. I've increased the vCPUs to 12 cores and 8GB of RAM and back down to 4 vCPUs and 6GB RAM with the following result:

 

scanner_performance_UI_4vCPU_6GB_RAM.jpg

 

Of  course I'll let this run for a few hours to see if the Yields increase to the numbers we were seeing during the remote session. One change I did make was I removed the disabled/re-enabled PCI passthrough on my ESXi host and added the two SAS cards back to my VM. I also got rid of the Seagate 4TB 5900RPM desktop drives that appeared to be incompatible with my SAS/SATA cards. I really think it had something to do with the drive/SAS card combo, but we'll see. Again, I'll let the performance UI run for a few hours to see if the Yields remain low and the Dispatcher average delay holds steady.

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