A process stops responding on a Windows Server 2003-based server that has a very large amount of memory

Consider the following scenario:

• You have a Windows Server 2003-based server that has a very large amount of memory.
• You have several processes running at the same time.
• These processes use more than 4 gigabytes of shared memory regions.

Generally, in this scenario, you see one thread consume all the resources of one CPU (Kernel-Time), and a process stops responding.

NoteThis issue occurs when you use an x64-based version of Windows Server 2003 and a SAP ABAP Application Server for Internet Pricing and Configuration (IPC). If you use Process Explorer together with symbols, you encounter one spinning thread that consumes all the CPU (Kernel-Time).

This situation occurs because Windows Server 2003 manages the concurrent requests to the shared regions by calculating and updating hash tables. Therefore, one thread just spins while it tries to update the hash tables repeatedly.

This problem will not be fixed in Windows Server 2003. Therefore, we recommend that you migrate to Windows Server 2008.