I am having some big problems with my customer and his (main tool for doing business) Access Database.
This is the setup
An MS SBS Standard running Exchange and acting as fileserver - one of the shared drives hold an Access Database which is used for daily business.
There are 9 clients - 8 of them WinXP one 2k left.
Since their former av-product got out of licence I suggested avast! (thinking deployement should be easy going ;))
Now here’s the problem - upon avast! running - access to this database and queries within it take for ever…
I have tried all of the following:
excluding ‘:*.*’ from standard provider for server and clients (both the same)
excluding ‘\<share>’ for server and clients
even excluding ‘*.mdb’ for server and clients
(of course every exclusion was added - not replaced)
→ no change
thinking it is an issue of the server (performance is also bad on clients without avast! installed) I tuned off everything but ‘Exchange 2000/2003’ and ‘SMTP 2000/2003’ plugins (had ‘Network Shield’ and ‘Standard Shield’ in addition before)
→ no change
at this time - guessing it might be accessing clients slowing down the database (guessing this because the more clients start working the worse it gets) status now is:
removed avast! from all clients / only mentioned two providers running on server
→ this will be my test for tomorrow
(before I forget - I set the ‘oplocks’ entry to ‘1’ reading about in here)
So now my questoins:
any ideas in gerneal? am I missing something?
I also started a performance monitoring today thinking maybee running ams is putting too much load on the server? (3GHz XEON 1GB RAM)
if this works for tomorrow I would try and start net and standard back on server, or might there be a better approach to find the solution?
No, you need to set it on the server. And it didn’t help even after the server was restarted, right?
In this case, it would be useful if the problem happens even if you pause and/or stop the avast on-access scanner on the server (or on the clients, if stopping it on the server doesn’t help).
like I said - the only ones left were Exchange/SMTP running on server, no clients installed at all…
around 13:00 today I was told ‘database still horrible’ so I stopped the last two providers (via GUI - did not remove client on server) → no change
I can’t seem to identify anything out of the ordanary like cpu load at max all the time or no memory left…
So now I removed the server-client - and restarted - if there is no chang by 12:00 I guess I will remove the AMS as well. Still could be that it has nothing to do with avast! - although this was the only change…
So the problem happens if avast is installed on the server, even if completely disabled, and stops happening as soon as you uninstall it from the server? And avast presence on the workstations has no effect at all?
one more thing I have not thought about - the mail-server does not recieve mails via smtp directly (due to certain circumstances this can not be changed).
So a programm called Pop2Exchage is pulling mails from pop-accounts and delivering locally via smtp.
If I get providers right this would mean I can leave away smtp200/2003 and add internet mail right?
And can this be a problem? (shouldn’t I guess)
But yes - stopping client on server does not help - but I did not have the chance of restarting with stopped client.
Hmm, it would be useful to find out if the problem happens even if you restart the machine with the “avast! antivirus” service start type set to “Manual”.
ok - I missed, that service is started by policy if not running (and settings overwritten)
so I stopped the service manually - but still - as soon as avast-client is installed, even when service is stopped the database can almost not be accessed anymore :-[
the only thing I was able to verify to now is OpLocks set to ‘1’ (could it be, that avast-client installation sets this to ‘0’? because after entering it again and installing client it was back to ‘0’)
today was first day running this way… (all providers I would like to have running on - standard shield with mentioned exceptions) → performance of access db miserable
any more ideas?
when you say ‘set service to manual start’ should it still be started by AMS if not running? does this make any difference?
stopping providers by hand (setting group to not overwrite settings before) and performance is good.
now - I guess I will try enabling one at a time (but probably during the weekend) although I think to remember running exchange allone was enough to have problems…
…well - it was running without enabled providers since yesterday… today I got a call ‘database ist terribly slow’ - I will try to stop by over the weekend just to see myself.
But I guess I will have to remove avast! from the server and try building a similar test-environment
