Software troubleshooting tips?

KGhaleon

I have a user who uses a powerful engineering program that is quite heavy on resources, so he uses a workstation/server machine to get his job done. Once a day, like half a day, the program will give him an error that locks up his system for 10 minutes and crashes the program(causes him to lose an hour of work). The program accesses and runs engineering files that are located on a server. The program is tied into a license server.
It's not any specific file and seems to be random when running this program. Reinstalling the program doesn't help.

There are three people with this problem, they all have similar computers which are running the same engineering app. This lead me to think there might be a server or network issue, but after investigating...both teams are saying that the issue is with the client. >=\

I updated network drivers and firmware, checked the firewall, has plenty of disk space, performance is good, etc. Will be checking the hard drive and RAM next.

Google does nothing.
Had another person from the server team examine the path to the network resource the user was accessing and she found nothing wrong.

They provided me logs and diagrams, which I can't post here, and I'm scratching my head staring at them. This program is a bit strange to me and I don't generally work it...so I'm not sure how to go about troubleshooting this. I still think it's a server issue but I need to backup my statements with evidence to support this.

Any tools or suggestions I could try? This whole week has been bad on my brain so I'm getting really stressed out dealing with this stuff everyday.

dynamik

Tell him to save every five minutes

I'd contact the company for support as it seems to be an issue with the program.

sambuca69

You could try running Procmon and see what's happening. (Process Monitor)

Or like Dynamik suggested, contact the vendor.

undomiel

Here's vote number three for contacting the vendor. It can save you a load of fruitless troubleshooting. Or make you feel good to know that there are some really funny support guys out there.

HeroPsycho

KGhaleon wrote: »

The program accesses and runs engineering files that are located on a server...

You might want to try copying the files to the local workstation and edit them that way just to see if that makes any difference. Some files, particularly larger and more complex ones, don't play nice via network access. If that alleviates the problem, you may need to use Offline Files or a custom script to copy the data down for editing and uploading back up when finished.

You might also want to collect performance logs, too. Sure would be nice to know what the errors are saying in the event log.