Comments on: Be careful: Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 can make your servers lazy

By: Mihir

Mihir — Thu, 29 May 2008 07:12:25 +0000

hello All,

I have my Server developed for sending reports. When I use Windows SP1, it seems it is faster (approx 16 secs for one Report) and when I run it on Windows 2k3 SP2 it is much slower. I put the logs in my code to find out what the difference it creates and found that in SP2 code is getting executed at much slower speed. Do you guys knows about this cause??

Regards,
MIhir

By: Dana

Dana — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:06:31 +0000

Fix – http://www.hoyty.com/hoytyweblog/archives/2007/04/windows_2003_se.html

By: Mike Schinkel

Mike Schinkel — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:40:20 +0000

I had the same problem at Rich Morrison; it made my HP LaserJet 4100 MFP)go offline (I have but one printer on a small network.) Glad I found this post so I could just rollback the service pack instead of wasting hours on end trying to figure it out.

BTW, I was able to get the printer to work by setting it up on an Internet Port, but it doesn’t give the full functionality so I’m going to rollback. Nonetheless, the Internet Port might be better than nothing for someone else if they can’t rollback for some reason. HTH.

By: Rich Morrison

Rich Morrison — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:48:03 +0000

We just installed SP@ on a S2K3 print server and it broke many printer connections, made them go offline. Looks like its related to the RSS and TCP offloading that is on by default after SP2 installation. We’ve rolled back the SP install until we can get a better handle on how this affects our other systems.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 06:26:52 +0000

Lukas, I am also an advocate of patching early. We deploy any security-related patches as soon as they become available. However, one should always be careful with service packs since they usually change a lot. There is a relatively high probability that you will run into problems after installing a newly released SP. So if your system works fine and you have already all security-related patches installed you should better wait until the “friends of the early patch tactics�? discovered all the bugs

Nick, it seems as if SP2 has some serious network related bugs. As to the TLAs, I think it is very difficult to find new technical expressions nowadays. Try “RSS�? in Google, and you’ll see that Microsoft is not the only “rebadger�?.

By: nick

nick — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 01:35:58 +0000

SP2 is sneaky. We had an issue where it blocked the creation of localhost>localhost TCP connections with some funky new ‘feature’ called Recieve Side Scaling (RSS). This wiped out one of our major webapps which creates local TCP connections for it’s various components to talk to each other.

Why microsoft chooses to “rebadge” well known TLA’s is beyond me. Why this is/was turned on by default and not documented properly in the technet article listing the most recent changes implemented by SP2 is beyond me too. I’ve to just accept such things as “Microsoftisms”

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/network/NDIS_RSS.mspx

How to turn the sucker off;
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927695

By: Lukas Beeler

Lukas Beeler — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:44:09 +0000

We’ve been running on SP2 since quite some time, but with two internal servers (an x346 and x3650) we aren’t exactly a big environment.

The issues you’ve described were covered about a month ago on the SBS Blog.

By now, we have several customers running their SBS on SP2, and several other customers already transitioned without any issues.

Especially on our internal systems, i’m an advocate of the patch early tactic – it serves as an excellent test environment before deploying at customers sites.