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Abilis

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Compressed files and Folders

Hi!

I recently saw that a lot of files and folder in the whole file sytem are with the compressed flag activated. This includes files and folders inside Documents and Settings, C:\Windows, C:\Windows\System32, etc.

What could be the cause of this? Some time ago we ran very short in disk space in this server.

In windows counters, we are also seeing high page file per seconds. This wasn't normal until some weeks ago. I think it is related.

How can I revert this for all files and folders in the the drive and what could possible cause this?

Thanks
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dyuburg
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It's not related with high paging but with low disk space. In this case Windows starts wizard which ask you about deleting files from Deleted Items, Temporary Files and compressing unused files. How to uncompress? Right click on the folder then Properties, then Advance then uncheck Compress content to save disk space.

Check for available disk space, probaly you need upgrade disk space? Check for Memory counters, probably, if you have enough disk space, then  you have a lack of memory and its caused to high paging.
There is no counter called page file/sec.
which counter are you looking at is it page faults/sec or pages /sec

If you see a high value for page faults/sec you do noyt need to worry as most of them are soft page faults.

If the pages / sec counter is high 1000 or more it might be a concern as its related to hard faults.

soft faults are handled in the RAM itself, the page of memory is outside the working set of the process but still in ram so to fault it back to the process address space the a disk access is not required. so it does not have any latency associated with it

On the other hand hard faults are those where the page of memory has been moved to the page file and so if the process requires it it has to access the disk and this leads to latency.

windows will have lots of soft page faults its by design. don't worry about the page faults / sec counter.

how much free space do you have in the system partition?

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Abilis

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dyuburg: I know how to mark them (one by one) to become uncompress again, but I need a solution to do it in the whole file system, at once. There are a lot of files and folder, dispersed in a lot of places, that are compressed. It's impossible to search one by one and unmark the flag. Disk space is 30% free. But as I said, they had a problem some time ago with free space.

madhurjya123: It's pages /sec. My mistake. The value, for several moments, is above 1000 pages per second. See the graphs.  Peges per sec and ram used (in the same interval). Just like said, partition is with 30% of free space. Total installed memory is 4 GB.

What about the compressed files? Any ideas? I know that the read operation of large files can cause high page per second, even with low ram memory consumption.


pages-per-sec.png
ram-used.png
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Any body has any other info about this?

Regards.
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Which version of Server?

If it's not 64 bit,you don't get 4gb,only about 3 or 3.25.

I would run a chkdsk as this can clean up errors that can cause these issue plus a good defrag may help.

Windows does have a tendency of slowing down after a while of being up(unlike a great NOS like Netware) for a while.
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It's a Windows 2003 Standard Server with Sp2, 32 bits. The /PAE flag is set in boot.ini.
Generally speaking,when you create a volume,folder compression is not on by default.
If it is set,then you could probably uncheck the box under volume properties and see if that makes a difference.
>Some time ago we ran very short in disk space in this server.

Be very careful you don't have more data than disk if you do an uncompress.
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pgm554, the compress flag is not set in the logical partition.
About a way to uncompress all files at once, any ideas?
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digitap
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thanks for the points!