Recently, I have setup some systems on a 10G Network connecting to iSCSI solid state storage. This setup is REALLY fast but I have seen some problems with it recently. In fact, just the other day one of the systems became unresponsive and I saw the following error in the event log:

tcp/ip has detected high memory utilization and has terminated some existing connections to  maintain system stability.

Also in the event logs shortly after that I saw entries about the iSCSI initiator losing connection to the storage and other nasty messages of that sort. After searching around a bit I came to a couple of potential fixes for this problem:

  1. Removing the Symantec Endpoint Firewall from this system, as this could be cause problems when inspecting every packet that comes across  that 10G port.
  2. Disabling Memory Pressure Protection in Windows – article discussing this topic

Hopefully between the two this will solve the problem. I didn’t know that such a feature even existed in Windows. But basically this “feature” will start dropping packets if windows detects an attack on that port. I don’t really know what Microsoft considers an attack, but I am sure 10G of traffic across a port is something that might seem odd to the application.

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