woodaway.ca

 

Since last night, clients keep complaining about on-and-off performance issues regarding one of the ISA proxy arrays.  At the time, we just restarted the application server that published behind the ISA array, and client told that the speed was improved.  But today, the same thing happened again, then I started to take a look at the performance in the task manager on one of the servers in this two-server array, checked the CPU and memory usage of each process.  The overall CPU usage was around 30%, looked pretty normal on this dedicated reverse proxy server.

Later, compared to the CPU usage on another server in the array, I found the HPSMHD.EXE was always taking 25% of the CPU, which is quite suspicious.  Recalled another case several months ago, this HP System Management Homepage service took 60% of CPU on a server, which made its response very poor, and restarting the service resolved the problem.  I was told there could be a memory leak that caused this issue.

There is very few information on the Internet about this service.  Even Hewlett-Packard themselves don’t put much information on their website, except a bunch of desprate sys admins asking similar questions in its IT resource centre forum, like this thread – hpsmhd.exe running at 50% CPU.

Known the issue, I just restarted HP System Management Homepage service, and CPU usage went down to 5%.  Although we’re still not able to determine if this is the root cause of the slowness, if this is, it can also explain why the issue was intermittent – because one of the servers in the array had this issue, if user hit another server, there was no slowness.

Just be aware of the symptom of this process, in some circumstances, when it happens, the server will be very very slow.

 

According to Microsoft, Dailysum.exe May Use 100% of CPU or Disk Resources.  In my case, it just took 50% of CPU on one of our ISA 2000 servers.

Here is how to find the PID and what the proper command to kill the process in Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft says ‘The Process Identifier (PID) number for Dailysum.exe can be determined either by using the command list or by using Task Manager.‘  What’s the command line?  How to show PID in Task Manager?

(1) Command line: tasklist, offical syntax in TechNet XP TechCentre.

(2) In Task Manger, View – Select Columns, check PID.

In MS/KB it just says ‘KILL – F PID number‘, but this is obviously a pre-2003 command, now we should use taskkill command.  You can find the syntax in New and Removed Tools.  Here is the command I used to kill the DAILYSUM.EXE process:

> taskkill /f /pid 4164                    #4164 is the Process Identifier (PID).

 

p.s. I don’t know why Hewlett-Packard don’t put more official document or KB on their website, like Microsoft or even Dell, instead, it just let users or their engineers post unofficially in online communities, same as in Visio stencil information I collected earlier.  Maybe that is the HP way.