This page and those under it document our setup in Arena.

Hardware: The hardware our Arena system runs on is a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server with 2 quad-core Xeon 3.0GHz processors. It has been loaded with 16GB of RAM. The drive configuration has 6 1TB drives in a RAID 6 Array. The Array has been divided for VMWare as 1 4GB volume, and 2 1.65TB volumes (roughly) as VMWare can’t deal with a single volume bigger than 2TB.

Software: We are currently running Windows 2008 Datacenter with SQL Server 2008 Standard as a virtual machine under VMWare. For simplicity of administration I have also installed the Cygwin package of Unix tools.

The machine is bored. The drives, RAM and processors are barely touched.  The processors especially, it would seem that either IIS, .NET or simply Arena itself are not multi-processor aware. I am not sure why, but I can pull up certain pages that hang the server for all users for anywhere from 10-15 seconds. When I check the server under those conditions I find a single processor pegged and the rest idle, so something is… not right. But I have not had time to decipher what is causing this.