I have been working on a server today which has 2 HDD, mirrored for redundancy. It is a software based mirror provided by Windows Server 2003. The server had been having a couple of performance issues, and whenlooking at the performance monitor, they tended to be caused by long write times to the Page File.
The page file was still in it’s default location on the C: drive – as this is SBS 2003 it had never been looked at. This meant that all page file write operations were being written to two HDD every time.
This is not neccessary. The solution that we have come up with to ealleviate this ‘dual-writing’ is to shrink the data partition (also mirrored) on the disk to give us back some unallocated space. I then created a simple volume on the first disk which could be used to host the page file. Assigned the next available drive letter and changed the page file drive assignments in the System Properties.
After a reboot and a couple of hours with loggin turned on I went back and found that the page file write time is significantly decreased.
This just goes to show how important it is to look where data is actually being stored on a system to make sure that you are getting the most from the hardware that you have.
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