page file and space on c: drive

[mquinn0908]

We are running out of space on our C: drive and I was wondering what affect it would have if we decrease the size of the page file on c: (it is 1.5GB) and the create a page file on our D: drive which has 64GB free. I am also trying to come up with a solution to our drive space issue other than reloading this machine. The C: drive has 5GB total with only 621MB being free.

 

[jthiessen]

You will experience better performance moving the page file if D: is another physical drive, or if you are in a RAID array. Reduce c: page file to 512Mb in order to preserve BSOD logging, and move the rest to another drive.

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[mquinn0908]

so it won't cause any issues having part of the page file on D: and a smaller one on C:? We do have a raid array.

 

[jthiessen]

Nope, performance will increase because the OS doesn't have to share the HD with the swap file. You will have to reboot the server though after you make the changes.

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[mquinn0908]

what size page file do you suggest on the d: drive?

 

[jthiessen]

Should be about 1.5x your RAM in total page file.

1Gb RAM = 1.5Gb Page file total

So after leaving 512 on c:, run another 1Gb on d:, in this example.

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[mquinn0908]

Just out of curosity what about adding another drive to this machine and mounting this extra space to the c: drive?

 

[jthiessen]

You are better off mapping the page file to D:. The reason is because if the system partition and the page file exist on the same drive, that physical hard drive needs to do more work, while d: does very little work providing file shares etc. You are much better off to load-balance your HD's by moving your page file to d:.

Does that make sense?

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[mquinn0908]

It does. Someone here had just thrown out the idea of adding a drive a mounting the new space to c: so I wanted to see if that was a viable solution or not.

One more thing we are experiencing some strange problems in computer managment where it will show files as being open on our E: drive (we have an C: D: & E but when you go to the users machine that it says it is open on, it isn't. And sometimes a user will have a file open on the E: drive and in compuer managment it doesn't show up. And even wierder is that sometimes you will have a file open and you get a message that it can't be saved and then you go and look for the file on the E: drive and it isn't there or it has a strange name. Do you think our space issues on the C: drive could be causing this? We have already scanned for viruses and it found nothing.

 

[jthiessen]

I doubt very much that this is a space issue. When was the last time your server was rebooted? Have you recreated any shares on e:? Did you delete a share a while ago, and accidently created a new share with the same name? These are just random thoughts.

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[mquinn0908]

The server was rebooted on Tuesday and we had these issues before then but they only started a couple of weeks ago. No shares have been recreated on e:, we haven't deleted any shares or created any new ones. I appreciate all the ideas and if you have anymore please let me know.

 

[mquinn0908]

Just another random thought to throw at you and see what you think. About a week and a have ago the server rebooted itself (event log states it was a bugcheck) and is it possible that if these files were open at the time it might have caused issues with them. As of right now it appears that only two files (an autocad map and excel spreadsheet) are experiencing this problem. There may be more files but we these have been used the most.

I noticed that there is a memory.dmp file on the C: drive that is 101MB, can i delete or move this file? I know this is the file that was created when the server rebooted from the bugcheck but can I move it to free space?

 

[jthiessen]

Yeah, you can easily move that. It is just information to give to Microsoft if you need to place a call based on the bugcheck. Is your server up to date?

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[mquinn0908]

we are at sp3 because I don't have enough HD space to install sp4.

 

[rmb1905]

It is no option to resize the C: drive by using a tool like server magic? (or partition magic for workstations)

Offcourse replacing part of the swapfile to D: is an action that for reasons mentioned above is something that has to be done anyway.