MOSS 2007 - The Great Hard Disk Consumer

Recently I've been performing a bit of a review on som MOSS servers that are a little "under-specified" on the hard disk front. While you probably shouldn't have anything with as little as 10GB as your only drive on a SharePoint server, it has got me looking at some of the places that SharePoint just eats needless space if you let it.

The Databases

Watch out for the SharePoint_Config database particularly - the log file can grow and grow in "default" SQL configurations. A sensible maintenance plan, or at the very least setting databases to backup in "simple" mode will dramatically reduce the size of the logs you are working with (GB down to about 20MB). You should understand the impact of changing your backup modes before you make any changes though. You have been warned™

IIS Logs from Searching

IIS will by default be generating loads of log file data - particularly when the content crawling is happening. You probably want to keep IIS logs for "normal" use, but not for content crawling. If you create yourself an alternative access mapping you can index all your content of one web application url (eg internal.enterprise.com), and turn off logging in IIS, while users access the other one (eg live.enterprise.com) , with logging switched on.

Diagnostic Logging

SharePoint puts its diagnostic logs in:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS

and by default logs very verbosely. You can change these settings to only log the more "interesting" severities through Central Admin > Operations > Diagnostic Logging

WSS_AdminService.log

You will find a log file called WSS_AdminService.log held in

C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Local Settings\Temp

The file is being written to almost constantly and becomes very large (900Mb by the time I found it).Worse still, because it's in the

C:\Documents and Settings\Default User

folder it gets duplicated when a new user logs onto the server console. Deleting it resolves the situation temporarily (i didn't notice any errors), but it will appear again and start growing.I'm not sure how to "solve" this one, as it seems completely unknown to the internet aprt from this one link (no solution).

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1363719&page=6

If and when I find the answer to this and other similar capacity issues I'll ammend this entry. For the meantime, careful monitoring and deletion should keep things right.