Question

Windows Server 2012 Inside Out Chapter 10 pages 369 to 395

1. In the Control Panel, where we were in Step 6, click on Change in the Virtual Memory panel. What is the current setting? (See pages 375-6 and Figure 10-4)
2. You could uncheck this box, and select “No paging file”.    A) Will this effect system performance on Enterprise servers? Explain. B) Why is setting the paging file to 0 MB not recommend? (See Caution on page 377.)
3. Open the Task Manager. Choose the Process tab and make sure “More Details” is selected. (See Figure 10-5 on page 379.)
   1. A) What applications are running? B) What is the difference between an application and a process? (See page 378.) 4B) A) What is the percentage of CPU and Memory Usage? B) What is the percentage of CPU usage and how much memory is used by Task Manager?

Answer 1

The C: Drive only is currently set to 8192 MB as Paging File Size whereas the D: and E: are None.

A) Selection of "No paging file" won't effect much on the Enterprise servers because those servers are basically built to handle multiple computers at a time. Enterprise solid-state drives have wear-leveling features, which extend their lifetime
and improve overall performance. Whether you choose a solid-state drive with multilevel cells (MLCs) storing two bits per cell or single-level cells (SLCs). That means, that they have high processors to process multiple tasks, RAM is really high to handle multi-programming and storage capacity are of high volume. Somehow, it could effect the system's performance if the work load is 100% and the virtual memory is exceeded. Once the virtual memory reaches it's highest level, RAM is used to move some of the data from RAM to Hard Disk Drive (HDD) which will only work once the "paging option" is turned on.

B) Paging file to 0 MB is not recommended by the Windows because if virtual memory exceeds and there is 0 MB of paging size, then the disk fragmentation and poor performance of system might occur. On the system volume, the initial size of the paging file must be as large as the current physical RAM. If it isn’t, Windows Server won’t be able to write
Stop information to the system drive when fatal errors occur. Because of this, my recommendation is to leave the paging file on the system drive. As you set the paging file for individual drives, pay particular attention to the Total Paging File Size For All Drives information. Generally, you don’t want to configure a server so that the Currently Allocated value is 0 MB. This means no paging file is configured, which will make it harder for you to troubleshoot STOP messages because no dump file will be generated. Keep in mind that lack of a paging file won’t necessarily affect performance. Enterprise server hardware tends to have a lot of RAM. If the server was sized correctly for its workload and has a lot of RAM, it might rarely page to disk.

A) There are some of the applications that are currently running like Server Manager, Snagit Editor, Task Manager, Windows Explorer

B) The difference between an application and process is that, application in easy words is a software or a working environment in which you can input some data and in return you get the output. Example Microsoft Word is an application that is used to write documents. Process is a cycle in which an application must go through before the execution of the application till the termination of the application. That means, when you start an application, there is a process that needs to be performed in order to run the application properly. The process consists of using CPU, memory, Disk and Network if need be. Each application requires memory as well as a storage place to be executed. Paging File is an example of process.

A&B) The CPU usage is 10% and Memory usage is 20%. The task manager is using 7.5 MB of memory.

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