How to stop/start a process as shown in Task Manager

[mcseguy9]

Hello all. I have a friend who has a SBS 2003 server and there's a process, let's call it process.exe, that needs to be stopped and restarted as often as its handles count reaches 50,000. What I'm trying to do is a band-aid fix until we permanently resolve the issue at which time we won't need to stop/restart the service.

Anyway, if you go into Task Manager and add the Handles column you'll see that each process uses a certain number of handles. We have one process where the handles increases constantly. In a 17 hour period it went from 14,000 (which is high to begin with) to nearly 200,000! I stopped/restarted the process by stopping/restarting the service in services.msc and that started it back at zero. Of course it's doing the same thing as before where the handles count just keeps increasing, hence my desire to setup something so it will automatically stop/restart this process until we get the actual problem fixed. It's important that we don't just stop this service from running until we get it fixed because it's related to the anti-virus software on the server.

I did try setting up an alert in Performance Monitor and tried to have it run a batch file that would stop the service, but that didn't work because the process itself, process.exe, isn't the service name or something like that. In other words when I opened a command prompt and typed net stop process.exe I got an error message stating it wouldn't work because that's not the name of the service. Perhaps if I could determine the actual name of the service this could work?

So does anyone know how to setup something that will cause the process or service to stop and then restart every time the handles reaches 50,000? We could possibly just setup a task to run every X number of hours if we can't get this to work based on the number of handles being reached.

[jdc2000]

Does the service you need to stop and start show up in the Services list?

[mcseguy9]

Does the service you need to stop and start show up in the Services list?

If I go into services.msc it's there. It shows up with a normal type of name, something like VIPRE Enterprise Agent or something like that. But I can't figure out what the service name is that would be used with the net stop/net start commands.

[jdc2000]

Right-click on the service and select properties. See if the program file name is listed.

[mcseguy9]

If I right-click the service, go to Properties and look at the path to the executable I can see the file name but I tried that with the net stop command and it said there was no service by that name. That's why I think the system sees the service by a different name or a name other than the executable that shows up in the Processes tab of Task Manager.

[Midknyte]

It says the service name right at the top of the General page.

Sysinternals has Process Monitor or Handles.exe to check the handles, but there is no facility to restart the service automatically.

[jdc2000]

Might have to contact the software vendor to find out what command to use to stop/start the service.

[Steve R Jones]

When I Google: VIPRE Enterprise

I see all sorts of references to-> VIPRE Enterprise from Sunbelt Software - Centralized, low-resource endpoint security. and

VIPRE Enterprise: High-performance Next-generation Total Malware Protection ENTERPRISE VIPRE Enterprise combines antivirus, antispyware, anti-rootkit and other technologies into a ...

Can't say that I'd want to stop n start the service all day long

[mcseguy9]

Nah, I just want to restart the service as frequently as the number of handles hits 50K or perhaps every few hours, at least until Sunbelt fixes the problem.

[mcseguy9]

The service name is sbamsvc. I'll try stopping/restarting it using the command line and see if that works.

[mcseguy9]

Bingo, that did it. I don't know why I missed that when I was looking at the properties of the service. I'll do a little testing with some Performance Monitor Alerts or just setup a scheduled task to restart the service every few hours.