Is the System Frozen or Busy?
I frequently get calls from customers stating that their system is frozen. While this does occur at times, in the majority of cases, the truth is that the system is busy doing whatever the requested it to do.
This happens a lot with SQL based systems. What can happen is a request, for example a ticket history report, ask for all history that they have. If there is years of ticket history, which is often the case, such a report can take an hour or more to gather all the information, format it, and generate the report.
Since they do not get their results in a few seconds, or a couple of minutes at most, they assume that the system has "frozen". The next thing that they do is reboot their computer. This may leave the original request still running. After rebooting, they may see reduced performance, because the long request is still running from before the boot.
So, users need to have at least a rough idea of the amount of data that they are asking their system to process and to allow a reasonable amount of time for this processing to occur.
Finally, if there is a question about whether or not the system did actually freeze, the system administrator, or support company, should be contacted before rebooting or killing the process.