Re: [RadiusNT] Tips for the weary crashing server

hostmaster@interaxs.net
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 12:33:14 -0400

Can you give us a URL for Diskeeper?

Jim

At 12:27 PM 10/18/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>My RadiusNT 2.5 / SQL 6.5 server had gotten VERY flaky lately. Blue
>screen exceptions, multiple daily spontaneous reboots, freezes, and
>more. Very ugly.
>
>Just in case you've never done this, folks, do this.
>
>Get a disk defragmenter and run it on your SQL drive while SQL and
>RadiusNT are completely shut down.
>
>My SQL database file was so severely fragmented that it was GPF'ing NT
>itself, with blue screens 0x0000001e and 0x0000000A. When I shut down and
>ran Diskeeper on the MSSQL/DATA drive, it said there were 111 (yes, one
>hundred eleven) fragments *PER FILE*, on average. There are 809 files on
>the drive, and the only thing installed here is MSSQL, RadiusNT/Emerald,
>and pcANYWHERE. I would find it hard to believe that, with 4 GIGS free on
>the drive, that when I installed MSSQL or the other apps, that the system
>files, the DLL's and such, were fragmented, and since they are mostly
>DLL's, system files, and such that get read but not written, the
>fragmentation had to be mostly in my data.
>
>I estimate that the MSSQL database itself was in approximately 55,000
>fragments, making the master file table an absolute MESS. It was so
>severly stressing the NTFS system to be handling a file with that many
>fragments, that it was crashing. (I found tech notes on MSKB to support
>this theory).
>
>I ran Diskeeper, defragmented my hard drive, and the problems cleared up
>at ONCE. Thus far, no more reboots or lockups.
>
>I had not been running Diskeeper on my SQL server's data partition because
>I assumed that since SQL had created the database device of the
>appropriate size, and then allowed the database to expand within it, that
>fragmentation would not occur -- the entire device had been created at
>once, and SQL handled the internal allocation of space within the device.
>
>Boy was THAT a wrong assumption. Your SQL database devices can and do get
>fragmented. Heavily.
>
>If you are not regularly defragmenting your drives on your busiest
>machines, or machines that keep LOG FILES (mail servers, web servers, ftp
>servers, and now SQL servers), you're killing your performance, especially
>on things like mail servers that have extensive logs that are opened,
>written to, and then closed for every transaction. These log files get
>quite fragmented, and now I know it happens to the SQL data file, as well.
>
>Invest in a defragmenter. You won't be sorry.
>
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