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I had an IT problem that I had trouble finding the answers for. That doesn’t happen a lot, so I’ll post it here and hope that this post gets indexed in Google so that people searching for it find an answer.

The problem was that I had unexplained high CPU utilization on a Windows 2003 server. In the task manager, no processes listed were showing any CPU use, but the system reported processor utilization between 50-60% when idle.

The answer was that the Logical Disk Manager Administration Service was running (and was apparently hung). The thing about this server that I hate to put in writing anywhere is that we tried (despite my warnings, btw) to run software mirroring on an extremely large drive with an insane amount of disk access. When we saw performance issues, the software RAID was the first thing to go, but that service remained running (I’m not sure why).

Anyway, we’re going to be making this server a hardware RAID like it should have been in the first place. My database replication is working and will hopefully be done sometime before midnight.

I hope that at some point in the future a network admin reads this and says “Yes! I told [my boss] we should have gone hardware RAID on that new server.  Software RAID was just a stupid thing to try.”  If that happens, do me a favor and reply to this.  Chances are good it’ll brighten an otherwise painful day in our IT department.