csrss.exe High I/O in combination with Terminal service

[Vincent]

Hi,

Currently I’m running into some issues which occur on each and every
windows 2003 server that I’m managing:

When someone logs in on a server the csrss.exe process starts to use up a
lot of disk I/O. It seems to have a minimum of 10 MB/s with a maximum of 80
MB/s although the average seems to be around 30 MB/s. The high I/O continues
until the user logs off. The high I/O also stops completely when (and this is
especially weird) the Terminal service client screen is minimized, but high
disk activity will resume as soon as the screen is restored.

I am aware of knowledge base article 934330, and even though the article in
question states the fix is foor the issue that crss.exe utilizes a lot of
cpu instead of high I/O, I decided to install the hotfix on a server to see
if the problems are related. Unfortunately it seems they’re not.

As I already said I'm experiencing this issue on multiple windows 2k3
server versions (web, standard, standard R2). They are all running service
pack 2 and are fully patched. The hardware differs as well. I've seen this
problem occur on Dell and HP servers so it is practically impossible that its
hardware related.

I'm at loss as to what the cause is. Does anybody have a clue?

Thanks in advance,
Vincent

 

[rpremuz]

Re: csrss.exe High I/O in combination with Terminal service

On Oct 17, 3:56 pm, Vincent <Vinc...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
>
> Currently I’m running into some issues which occur on each and every
> windows 2003 server that I’m managing:
>
> When someone logs in on a server the csrss.exe process starts to use up a
> lot of disk I/O. It seems to have a minimum of 10 MB/s with a maximum of 80
> MB/s although the average seems to be around 30 MB/s. The high I/O continues
> until the user logs off. The high I/O also stops completely when (and this is
> especially weird) the Terminal service client screen is minimized, but high
> disk activity will resume as soon as the screen is restored.

Vincent, I don't know the solution to the problem but I can confirm
that I experience the same on two MS Windows Server 2003 SP2 (Standard
Edition) with all the latest patches (the servers don't have the same
hardware or software configuration).

Here is how I can get extremely high I/O for the csrss.exe: when I'm
connected to the server through the Remote Desktop I press and hold a
key (e.g. Shift or Alt) on the keyboard: the Process Explorer shows
that Other Bytes Delta is about 200 MB in that case. See picture on
http://www.hotshare.net/image/91284-64755441d6.html

This is really a major issue. It there any MSMVP who has seen that
before and knows the solution?

-- rpr.