On one of our production servers the C: partition is hovering at around 2gb free out of 40gb. It's a production web server so drastic changes aren't going to be possible. My best option looks like telling Windows to move the pagefile to the D: partition (which has a ton of space). I've made the changes in My Computer but haven't actually rebooted it yet. Are there any "gotchas" I need to be aware of? My worst case nightmare is the machine somehow fails to reboot. While I do have a backup server available it'd be at least an hour to get our site setup on that server with SSL and all (another story).
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Potentially useful link: blogs.technet.com/b/clinth/archive/2013/10/08/3577494.aspx– ZoredacheApr 14, 2015 at 22:38
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1Is this a virtual machine?– joeqwertyApr 14, 2015 at 23:21
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No. It's a physical server.– SteveApr 14, 2015 at 23:22
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3 Answers
You should be perfectly fine to move it. If you manually delete it while the OS is offline Windows just re-creates it.
answered Apr 14, 2015 at 22:36
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I think I might try the winsxs cleaner (support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2852386) update. That's clearly the largest folder on the primary partition. Any info on using that?– SteveApr 14, 2015 at 22:53
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Actually, in reading through more technet stuff it looks like you have to install Desktop Experience or so an unsupported move and manually copy 2 files. And it looks like a reboot could take significant time (hours?) which I can't do on production.– SteveApr 14, 2015 at 23:09
Make sure you set the alternate crashfile (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl) otherwise memory dumps get interesting when the pagefile is not on C.
You can move it, however the larger question is do you have partitions or separate disks?
I'm guessing from your description that C: and D: are partitions of the same local drive. If that's the case, there is little to worry about. Leave 300MB on the C: drive if you want to avoid the warning message that says "If the pagefile on volume C: has an initial size of less than 126 megabytes, then the system may not be able to create a debugging information file if a STOP error occurs." Copy whatever settings are there on C: for min/max size and automatic management to the D: drive.
If the D: drive is removable, SAN or on a less reliable SCSI connector; the server will bluescreen if that drive is disconnected. That is the biggest gotcha.
Also, if the D: drive is a physically different drive, then compare performance of the drives. If the D: drive is significantly slower, anything that uses the pagefile will slow down. If they are equal performance, then you may see a higher performance level when the pagefile and system files on C: can be accessed at the same time.
Another poster has already given you instructions for setting up a dedicated crash file. Follow those if you think you will ever need a full memory dump for debugging purposes.
