I have a Windows 2012 Standard server (Dell T620) running as a workgroup server for 8 people with some file shares and Remote desktop installed. Server specs are a single 6 Core Processor, 1.5TB of HD space RAID 10, 32GB of RAM. Users have access to Office 2013 and old access based utility billing software (Caselle) Qbooks 2013 for a single user, Adobe Reader and Acrobat, Chrome. Installed Desktop experience on the system and use Classic Shell so that users will not have to commit seppuku by trying to use metro on a non touch environment.
Users are reporting that throughout the day while they work on the system there are pauses in performance. They may last a few seconds, 30 seconds or a couple of minutes. For example the user could be typing a document in Word, or Outlook and there would be a pause and then the characters would come up at once.
Troubleshooting steps:
Looked at the logs for the times the users reported issues and I cannot see a smoking gun.
Server has the latest possible drivers and updates.
Performance meters: Did not notice any issues with network bandwidth or memory usage issues or CPU usage.
Made sure caching on controller was enabled to eliminate any possibility of performance issues when a user logs on or off the terminal session. That issue affected Windows 2008, but did not know if it applied to Windows 2012.
Tried disabling numerous Microsoft office maintenance Tasks that would occur during normal operating hours.
Disabled search indexing.
Checked Antivirus settings. We Use ESET File security that automatically creates exclusions for server operating systems and added our own exclusions as well. Disabled any advanced heuristics on ESET.
Verified that the licensing heartbeat task for Office executes correctly every morning at 12:00am. What I am seeing in the logs quite a bit is Security-SPP source events (on the Application Log) every time a user runs an office app. The office had been activated and working fine. In the licensing option for Remote desktop I see only 1 license assigned and 7 available.
The only other log of concern is the Event 17890 Source MSSQL$MICROSOFT##WID We do not have SQL server installed on this machine so I assume it is the windows internal database. The error is a significant part of SQL server process memory has been paged out. This may result in a performance degradation. Duration 7243 seconds. Working set: KB 90044, Committed KB: 359960. Memory Utilization 25%%. the figures may vary a bit. Some events are spread out over an hour others one after the other.
Updated the drivers on all the machines (some Windows XP SP3 running the latest terminal services client) and some Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit SP1.
Made sure that user log off their sessions at the end of the day.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.