Information on the impact of low disk space on Windows server performance
I have recently taken over a role support a large number of 2003 servers. They all have 10GB or less boot partitons and some of them are in my opinium low on disk space (less than 1.5 GB). I think this low disk space is impacting the perfomance of the servers and sometimes they crash as the disks fill with temp files, log files etc. I would like to propose a "change" to the standard build on new servers to have a 20GB boot partition. Before I raise this change I would like some whitepaper, articlesfor evidence for the impact of low disk space on the performance of NTFS. I have had a look but could not find anything concrete. I found article on Windows 2003 tuning but it didn't mention at what point a systems performance will degrade and the impact as the disk fills up. If you have any knowledge, articles on this I would be very grateful. Many Thank James.
ps. I have been slowly moving pagefiles, IIS logging, print spoolers etcfrom the C drives of the servers but thisa slow process as I have to get each "change" approved and there are over 200 servers which have not all been setup with good standard practice in mind. thanks again.
pss. We are testing 2008 and would like to address this before they build 2008 servers with 10GB boot partitions.
August 13th, 2008 1:36pm
Hi,
It is not recommended to use NTFS on a volume that is smaller than approximately 400 MB, because of the amount of space overhead involved in NTFS. This space overhead is in the form of NTFS system files that typically use at least 4 MB of drive space on a 100 MB partition.
Besides, here is the forum for Exchange, I recommend you to use newsgroup for Windows Server to get relevant help.
Discussions in General Discussion
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.server.general&cat=en_US_9741c575-ec92-42f8-85ba-00dfe1483cf5&lang=en&cr=US
Information share with you:
Overview of FAT, HPFS, and NTFS File Systems
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/100108
Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2003
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/performance/tuning.mspx
Performance problem because of contention on CmpRegistryLock
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=317357
Hope it helps.
Xiu
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August 14th, 2008 12:42pm