We got what was wrong.

Everytime this happened there was a job running which was decrypting the logs for making one our usage reports.

Sorry if i caused any inconevnience to anyone who might have racked their brains as to what might have happened.

Does it mean Portal goes offline/unavailable when logs get processed?
Is this normal and by design?

I am not such an expert that i can answer the question wether it is normal and by design.

The portal  is very much available in the sense if you got to the site  strucuture you will find all the sub areas.

But when you first open the portal page and go to to the are it says no sub ares available .

We restarted that sharepoint services and the sub areas  appeared back.

Please note that the sharepoint servives had not stopped running we stopped and ran it again.

So we have thought of another approach that instead of decrypting the files from their current location which seems to cause some disturbance we are palnnning to make a copy of the log file in some other directory and then decrypt it.


Possibly some one else like todd or bill who are experts can answer whether what happened is normal.