Server question (yes, this is the wrong forum, but this question spans multiple categories)

[Gunslinger08]

Can anyone think of a reason for compressing a hard drive that's in use on a production environment web server? It really doesn't make sense to me, but I just wanted to see if anyone else had a good reason for it.

Helped you pick a forum (I actually think you'll get a better response here too) 🙂
Anandtech Moderator - bsobel

 

[wedi42]

to make it slower?

 

[bsobel]

I can think of a couple of reasons, but the logic is pretty weak:

1) Running out of drive space and didn't have time/budget/etc to reprovision with a larger drive

2) If the system is IO bound but not CPU bound compression can actually be faster (quicker to decompress the stream in memory than perform all the IO to read the uncompressed version)

 

[spidey07]

What specifically is the application and what does it's data look like?

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: spidey07
What specifically is the application and what does it's data look like?

It's a content management system that pulls .NET based templates from a web server's hard drive and places content in them from SQL. The server in question is the SQL server which gets a minimum of 1 DB hit (or many, depending on the template) for several KB (up to a meg or more) worth of data per page request.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: spidey07
What specifically is the application and what does it's data look like?

It's a content management system that pulls .NET based templates from a web server's hard drive and places content in them from SQL. The server in question is the SQL server which gets a minimum of 1 DB hit (or many, depending on the template) for several KB (up to a meg or more) worth of data per page request.

what is doing the compression?

*see where I'm going with this? cache.*

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: spidey07
What specifically is the application and what does it's data look like?

It's a content management system that pulls .NET based templates from a web server's hard drive and places content in them from SQL. The server in question is the SQL server which gets a minimum of 1 DB hit (or many, depending on the template) for several KB (up to a meg or more) worth of data per page request.

what is doing the compression?

*see where I'm going with this? cache.*

Windows. Someone turned on disk compression.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: spidey07
What specifically is the application and what does it's data look like?

It's a content management system that pulls .NET based templates from a web server's hard drive and places content in them from SQL. The server in question is the SQL server which gets a minimum of 1 DB hit (or many, depending on the template) for several KB (up to a meg or more) worth of data per page request.

what is doing the compression?

*see where I'm going with this? cache.*

Windows. Someone turned on disk compression.

screw that then.

dumb.

I was thinking you had some kind of SAN with huge cache and were using hardware compression.

Next dumb question - is there actually a problem or are you looking for one?

 

[JDMnAR1]

I use Windows built-in disk compression selectively on some of my servers. In some instances it is because of bsobel's reason 1. In others, it is because the contents of the compressed folder are essentially used once, but can't be disposed of due to various policies/regulations - as an example, IIS log files.