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I was having a conversation with Chris on the train home, we must have looked quite like the stereotypical IT people, “how big’s your cluster size?”, anyway Chris was having issues with one of the trading systems at work, the server involved received market feeds, files from different business lines and stored them for access by the end user, reports, logs etc, all different sizes varying from 1k to 10MB. The server (Windows 2000) grounded to a halt and it was discovered that the processor was very busy because the file system was heavily fragmented. So we spoke about this, he asked me if I had any suggestions and he told me what he’d been doing at work.

I suggested the following. Let’s say you’ve got a 200GB volume, it’s mainly subdirectory after subdirectory of small 1k/5k files, it’s 60% fragmented, we have two options, both will be successful, but one involves more work, but might bring you longer term stability.

Option 1: Install diskeeper and run a defragmentation of the file system or use the windows defragmentation tool to defragment the disk and resolve issues with the file system – if you’ve got diskeeper then you can schedule it to defragment the file system at times when the server isn’t in use or as busy.

Option 2: Back up the drive completely to tape, or robocopy to another server. Re-format the drive to smaller size clusters for example 1k instead of the windows default, install diskeeper, run a restore or robocopy the files back on to your newly created drive. Run diskeeper or your defragmentation software to defragment the data and finally tidy up the file system. With diskeeper you can also enable the frag guard technology, and schedule the automatic defragmentation at quiet intervals.

Hopefully I haven’t left anything out, but if you have any suggestions or comments, I’d love to hear them!

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