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I have a Windows Server 2012 with rather slow hard-drives BUT with a lot of RAM and I can't change that (it's an Amazon EC2 actually).

What can I do to optimize performance?

I have 16 GB of physical memory but 5-6 GB of it always stay free. Should I increase disk-cache size? Or maybe disable the page file? Or make it fixed size? Interested in general Windows tuning tips, possibly not involving "buy a faster drive from Amazon" :)

PS. The server runs an IIS web-server (intensively used) and an SQL-server with one small (6GB) database. SQL already uses 7GB (looks like all the DB is already cached there).

Thanks guys!

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There is nothing you CAN do. Disc cache size - Windows automatically uses all non-app-allocated memory, so - there you go. Page file - should not do a lot anyway (only swap out stuff really not used). Slow databases with SQL Server are just not working.

On top, SQL uses it's own caching anyway..... unless you sabotaged that one.

What you can do is update SQL Server to 2014 and activate the delayed logging option, which gives you better performance at the cost of possible transaction losses.

At the end, a database does need fast IO if it does a lot of work, and no magic wand will work around that ;)

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  • Well, I found one thing I CAN do: Device manager - Disk Drives - Properties - Policies - Removal policy - "Better performance". Somehow all non-root drives on Amazon have this feature disabled, which means - write-caching is disabled.
    – jitbit
    May 14, 2014 at 23:30
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    Well, obviously - but any write caching carries a significant risk of corruption.
    – TomTom
    May 15, 2014 at 4:44

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