Terminal Services Performance Problems Occur Because Explorer.exe Maintains Instrumentation Data and Counters in the Registry (320261)

SYMPTOMS

If from 50 to 100 interactive Terminal Services users are logged on, and if other Terminal Services users are logging on or off at the same time, your computer may stop responding for about 10 to 30 seconds. This symptom is sporadic, but may occur from 10 to 20 times a day. When this problem occurs, the mouse and keyboard do not respond, but the computer is responsive on the network (to ping and net use commands), and on the console.

This behavior is similar to the problem that is described in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

317357 Terminal Services Performance Problem Because of Contention on CmpRegistryLock

CAUSE

These performance problem may be caused by a slowdown that occurs because of the number of inputs and outputs on the system disk during the registry-flush operation. The "system inactivity" intervals that you see in Perfmon.exe occur because of contention on CmpRegistryLock, which protects against registry writers (such as Perfmon.exe and Explorer.exe) during the hive-flush operation.

Explorer.exe maintains some private performance counters in the registry, which generates some registry-flush overhead.

RESOLUTION

Service Pack Information

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Windows 2000. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

260910 How to Obtain the Latest Windows 2000 Service Pack

Hotfix Information

Performance counters that are maintained on the common Explorer.exe path (Start and Run) were removed from the code to reduce the registry-flushing overhead.

The English version of this fix should have the following file attributes or later:

   Date         Time   Version        Size     File name
   --------------------------------------------------------
   21-Mar-2002  11:43  5.0.3502.5219  241,936  Explorer.exe

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was first corrected in Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 3.

MORE INFORMATION

For additional information about how to obtain a hotfix for Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

265173 The Datacenter Program and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server Product

For additional information about how to install multiple hotfixes with only one reboot, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

296861 Use QChain.exe to Install Multiple Hotfixes with One Reboot