Importance SAP Note – Performance issue on Microsoft Windows Server 2003

September 7, 2009 by mySAP
Filed under: SAP FI Transaction

SAP has released since 14.08.2009 about severe performance issues with memory intensive application scenarios on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. So far, the affected SAP applications we have observed have been mostly SAP CRM 2007 and one SAP ERP 6.0 system.

Microsoft’s recommended solution is for customers who experience this problem to immediately migrate to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 due to Microsoft has not released a hotfix or Service Pack to repair the problem yet.

The following problems may be occurred:

Some work processes seem to hang or transactions are running very slowly.
At least one of the work processes consumes 100% CPU.
If you look at the Performance tab of the Windows Task Manager (be sure to select View -> Show Kernel Times), the process with 100% CPU usage is consuming about 100% of the kernel time – see the red line.

You can also check this in transaction ST06:
Detailed Analysis Menu -> Snapshot – current data -> CPU.
The very slow work process might also block other work processes if it has allocated exclusive resources, such as shared memory. The result might be that your system locks completely.
We have seen this mainly in CRM systems, especially if IPC is configured to use a large shared pool. Other causes are configurations that use large ABAP shared object buffers, the flat memory model (es/implementation=flat) on Windows Server 2003, or running multiple ABAP servers on one box.

Review SAP note 1320013 and 1316558 for more details.

SAP Note 1320013 is intended to provide planning assistance for customers who cannot immediately migrate to Windows Server 2008.

There are various reasons why a customer cannot immediately migrate to Windows Server 2008, some cannot due to business reasons, some because the Oracle Database has not been released for Windows Server 2008 on Itanium and some others because their SAP product is not yet released on Windows Server 2008.