Troubleshooting CPU Usage

Published : September 27, 2005

If the performance of the DPM server is unacceptably slow, and you determine that CPU usage is a contributing factor, perform the following steps to congestion isolate and relieve the CPU bottleneck.

To get more information about CPU usage

On the DPM server, use Task Manager to determine which processes are consuming the most processing capacity. (On the Processes tab, review CPU usage.) If those processes do not return to their normal performance ranges, you may need to perform additional, application-specific diagnostics to identify the cause.

To resolve the immediate problem

  1. Close DPM Administrator Console.

  2. You may want to cancel some non-critical DPM jobs and running them later, when more memory is available.

    Important

    Canceling a protection job can compromise data protection. For more information, see “How to cancel a job” (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=52007 )in DPM Help.

  3. Stop and restart the DPM service and the SQL Server service. In Administrative Tools, open Services, and then restart the services by performing the following steps:

    1. Stop the DPM service if it is running. (The service stops automatically when not in use.) When you stop the DPM service, all active jobs will be canceled.

    2. Stop the SQL Server service (MSSQL$Microsoft$DPM$).

    3. Start the SQL Server Service (MSSQL$Microsoft$DPM$).

    4. Restart the DPM service.

  1. Turn off on-the-wire compression for protection groups. This is an advanced protection option that can be configured for individual protection groups. For more information, see “How to modify protection options” (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=52008) in DPM Help. Turning off on-the-wire compression can increase network use. If you require on-the-wire compression to run protection jobs over a wide area network (WAN), you may need to upgrade your hardware to accommodate the extra CPU load.

  2. Modify protection schedules for protection groups to stagger protection jobs. Consider offsetting some synchronization jobs from the beginning of the hour. For more information, see “How to modify protection options” (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=52008) in DPM Help.

  3. If the CPU usage continues to be a factor in degraded performance, you might need to either upgrade your hardware or offload some of the protection workload to another DPM server.

    For information about processor requirements for a DPM server, see the “Planning a Deployment” chapter in the DPM 2006 Planning and Deployment Guide (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=46355).