Xeon Server freezes randomly for a few seconds without a pattern or errors

windows-server-2012-r2

I've got a pretty strange problem.

I'm a sysadmin and manage dozens of Xeon servers but one of them (with a low user load) is behaving very strangely.

Server specs:

CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1230 V2
MB: Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI, Bios Version F2 (08/13)
RAM: 16GB DDR3 Dualchannel NON-ECC (2x Kingston 99U5471-037.A00LF)
OS: Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard

This Server hosts two Hyper-V machines. One is Linux Debian and the other Windows 7

The problem:
The server freezes randomly every hour or so for 5-40 seconds. By freeze I mean no more IO comes from the server, RDP connections are reset, remote SSH connections from the VMs are reset and all active connections get timed out.

When the server is back online I can see in the Task Manager that the CPU dropped to 0% while frozen.

The event log never has any entries from the freezes and afterwards no error messages from any service or system are logged.

What I can say about the freezes:

  • There is no pattern in the freezes
  • The freezes occur equally random with high or low CPU utilization
  • They occur with low and with high RAM utilization
  • It's not a NIC problem since the CPU drops to zero and this even happens when it's not plugged in
  • The HDDs are in good shape

I made a ping script that records the response times (500 means timeout) and let it run the last day.
Ping statistics

Has anyone ever encountered something like that?

Best Answer

The problems have stopped. I'm not sure what the final Solution was but it was one of those things:

  • I bought a new PSU since it was underscaled (was 200W is now 400W)
  • I re-installed all Intel chipset drivers
  • I re-installed the nic drivers
  • I doubled the RAM

And now I didn't have a single lag for over a month.

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