below is a question I posted on stackoverflow . as suggested by Martin Clarke I also post it here.

We have a really strange problem. One of the servers in the server farm becomes really slow. We see a number of timeouts in the logs and overall response time is not where it should be (and is on other servers in the farm).

What is also strange is that it is not just the web app - Just logging into the server takes up to 1.5 min to show you the desktop. Once you are in, the system is as responsive as ever - unless you try to launch something, i.e. notepad - it takes another minute to launch and after launch it works fine.

I checked a number of things - memory utilization is reasonable, CPU is below 15%, windows handles, event logs do not show anything.

Recycling the aps.net process does not fix it - it still takes over a minute to log in. Rebooting the server helped, but now it started to slow down again.

After a closer look we found out that Windows Temp directory is full of temp files - over 65k files. This is certainly something to take care of. But my question is could it be the root cause of the sluggishness, or there is still something else lurking in the shadows?

Edit

After more digging I am zeroing in on the issue related to the size of temp directories. This article: (see the original post this thing will not let me include a second link) describes something very similar. It still does not answer the question why the server is still slow even there is no activity.