I have a client that provides some server systems to a hospital, and a support ticket was raised that the desktop application was hanging waiting for the server. We did some extensive testing and its pretty clear that the server is responsive, and the network is fine, and that the problem is on the client end. (no requests are received during the hang etc...)
We take a look at the desktop machines and they should be fine, so we raise tickets with the software vendor who says that it must be the hardware, the hardware company says that it is the software, etc etc
Anyway, so talking to the nurses, they say that these machines often "hang" for 30 seconds at a time, and sometimes during important moments where they need to get data for a patient who is unwell, such as charts and status.
So I want to stick a client on these machines that would be able to detect arbitrary "unresponsiveness" of the keyboard/mouse and log that for analysis later.
Obviously I am wary to suggest some application that takes resources and makes the problem even worse, so I would interested to see any tools that would detect these (is it correct to say that the keyboard interrupts are being discarded?) scenarios by looking for the OS discarding the interrupts, or whatever is appropriate here.
so go on then serverfault, here is your chance to save a life.... ;-)
Edit: I am starting to think that some of the tools associated with real time systems might be appropriate, at least as a diagnostic.
