Symptoms

We have a customer that needs urgent help with slow performance on their production environment. At the smartforms runtime user level, when a menu button that navigates to another form is clicked, the website stalls for 0.5-12 seconds before navigating to the other form. It's the same delay/waiting problem in the whole system. From the "SmartObjects - Services - Tester" I've tried to call simple stored procedures in the database and the delay/waiting problem also occurs there. It could be a network problem between the webserver and the database server. However, according to our customer's own IT department, it is not a network problem and the two servers have more than sufficient resources (CPU, memory and space).
 

Diagnoses

We determined on the meeting that the CPU affinity level was set to use only 1 core (of the 8 cores available). After switching it to use all 8 cores, the load was spread across all CPU cores and everything went much faster.

However there were a lot of errors in the Windows Event Log like the following:
Exception.Message: 24109 The processor configuration has changedException.StackTrace: at SourceCode.Workflow.Client.InternalConnection.Call(ArchiveX ar, MessageType msgtype)
at SourceCode.Workflow.Client.Connection.CreateProcessInstance(String ProcName, Int32 Version, String Layer)
at bat.integration.BatServiceObject.CertificateWorkflow.Command.CreateCertificateWorkflowCommand.CreateAndStartWorkflow()
at bat.integration.BatServiceObject.CertificateWorkflow.CertificateWorkflowCommand.Execute()
at bat.integration.BatServiceObject.ServiceObjectAPI.Execute()

After restarting the service (to try and stop these errors) we saw that the affinity level in Task Manager jumped back to using only 1 CPU core. We checked licensing and think that it could be group policy. There are utilities to force it to use all 8 cores, although the customer doesn't want to run a custom utility on their production server.
 

Resolution

It turns out that the K2 production license was requested in 2013 and was for only 1 CPU license, in other words for some reason K2 only used 1 single CPU core to run on. After requesting a new license for 250 users and changing it in Management Console then restarting the K2 Host Server service, it is now running on all 8 CPU cores and the performance issues have been alleviated.