We have a Windows Server 2003 machine that acts as a Perforce (source control) server 
as well as a file server.

We are having an issue where the entire system is brought to it's knees whenever 
someone transfers a large amount of data and/or very large files to the server.

As soon as someone starts copying up a couple gigs of data, the entire system slows 
down. Perforce becomes unresponsive and often crashes (bad) and I even have trouble 
navigating the UI and doing simple things like opening the management console.

Opening the management console can take minutes, and even when it's open it's unresponsive.

The only way to fix this problem is to cancel the file copy.

Also, during this time, there performance monitors show almost no activity... as 
if the system weren't even under any heavy load.

This is severely affect us... does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

The server is:

Windows Server 2003, running SP2
Tyan Thunder K8SE S2892
Two Opteron 265's
4gb of RAM
a series of seagate drives set up into 3 raids using broadcom RAID controllers. One 
raid for perforce, one for file share, one for the OS.
onboard broadcom BCM5704C ethernet

Thanks...

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Because your system is showing no load, I would question if this is possibly a hardware 
problem.. Sometimes certain devices can hang up the system when they are being used 
due to interrupt requests, etc.. I would question if the onboard broadcom adapter 
is not hanging the system up when it is under heavy load... Also, with an onboard 
NIC the CPU and bus system has to manage it, and your OS isn't going to show that 
kind of load I don't believe.. My suggestion is to replace the onboard NIC (and disable 
it) with a PCI or PCI-E NIC card and see if it solves your problem.  They are cheap 
enough, and most people have extra sitting around, so try it.

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