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Got a server running a document delivery system on it. The machine is running extremely poorly (Windows XP). I've checked the regular things, like doing a memtest (turned out fine) and trying to degraf the HDD (not needed).

The only thing weird about this machine is that its running MSSQL server. And Symantec Anitvirus. (ugh)

Sometimes the machine reports "No hard drive space left". I immediately look at the one hard drive at the machine and it still has 20 gigs left. Each and every time.

Could MSSQL server cause this? Could this be tied to the machine's terrible performance?

Thanks!

7 Answers 7

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Too little information to really help.

  • What exactly reports "No hard drive space left"? Is it a popup on the desktop? A log entry? Where?
  • You might want to consider whether it's worth it running AV on a DB server. It can severly impact performance, and the infection risk on a pure DB server is very low. See also Do you run antivirus on your Windows servers?

Your problem sounds like you have some sort of software conflict. Maybe there's a clue to be had in some system log? What does the Windows event log say?

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  • I've spent a good deal of timing combing through windows errors logs. Nothing so far. As for the popup, I have not seen it myself many times, but it's literally a "no hard drive space left". A generic message box. I am not able to tell which program is comes from. I am going to try disabling Symantec and see if that helps.
    – bobber205
    Nov 19, 2009 at 18:21
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MSSQL likes RAM, it eats up as much of it as it can to improve performance. This will hurt other applications performance if ther isn't enough to go around.

Your question made me immediately think about the SQL server exclusions for Symantec Antivirus. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309422

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  • Tried uninstalling Symantec all together and the issues are still cropping up. I guess it's time to look at the virtual memory.
    – bobber205
    Nov 24, 2009 at 17:10
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Have you set your Virtual Memory high enough that it will accomodate the load? If the pagefile runs out of space, you'll get other "strange" errors...

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  • This is not a virtual machine.
    – bobber205
    Nov 19, 2009 at 18:49
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    The answer is not referring to a virtual machine, but to virtual memory; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory . The pagefile is the (special) file that Windows OSes use for virtual memory.
    – sleske
    Nov 23, 2009 at 4:30
  • @sleske, correct, I should probably clarify now that VM as an acronym actually carries two connotations instead of just one... (editing...) Nov 23, 2009 at 19:14
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Is the exact syntax of the error message actually "No hard drive space left," or is that just how you're interpreting it? Windows has a number of error messages that sound like they're talking about a lack of free disk space but are actually about running out of working storage (memory). For example, see error message two here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304101

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Is Symantec configured for on-access file scanning or does it run on scheduled basis? You might try turning off on-access scanning and see if that helps.

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I've run into a similar situation on one of our mssql 2000 servers. We had a few jobs that ran at night that would fill up the log file on the sever to full making taking over 30g of space on the log drives. Later a maintenance job would run that truncated the logs and made it look like nothing was wrong.

I would check any jobs that delete / update / insert records into the database that would cause the log file to grow.

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Also what version of SQL server? Autogrowth could be causing this.

As you can tell from all the questions, we need more information to better help you.

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