Sage 100

A customer's IT company is reporting to me that there is a 40 GB change in free disk space up and down on the dedicated MAS200 server, about 5-6 times during the day, When it's on the downward spike, they are dangerously close to no free disk space. I obviously need to get on there and clean up any obsolete copies or backups to free some additional space, but does anyone have any idea what causes these spikes? They claim there are no backups running during the business day - other than that, this is out of my realm.

Can they provide details on which folders are changing and by how much? Probably a good first place to start.

I would hazard a guess that these are temp files being created then deleted since it is a 200 install. But Waynes suggestion is the first place to start. I would also suggest that 40 GB of free space is NOT a lot of free space these days. Discussions should be opened about the need for more disk space (unless of course your clean up opens 500 gb of space). In the overall scheme of things, diskspace is dirt cheap when compared to a crash or data corruption because you ran out.

I concur with @JeffSchwenk, MAS makes extensive use of work tables for processing and reporting. Depending upon the size of the overall company database, particularly in history files, work tables and other temporary files could grow quite large during a particular reporting process. As Jeff points out, the amount of free space needed on the drive is proportionate to the size of the data in use. 40 GB sounds like a lot, particularly for an old coot like me who remembers when 50 MB was huge! Today, we can fill a 1 TB drive with VM's from a few projects. Time to expand their amount of free space. BTW, kudo's to the IT Company for employing good monitoring processes to identify a potential problem before it grows teeth enough to bite!

@ShawnSlavin - You are sooooo young!!!!!!

I didn't even think about the work files! I've asked It for a list. Thanks!

Honestly, 40gb is so off the charts relative to MAS data file sizes. I'm thinking this is something else. If the server has a ton of ram and something is crashing, it might be creating a dump file which is as large as the amount of RAM the server hase.

Is MAS installed on the system drive?

Thanks Mark - I can bring that up to them. Myron, it's installed on a partitioned drive.

Crash dumps, paging file, MAS wrk + SessionID files, MAS .OLD files from Rebuilding could all the comprise the variation, depending on which drive \mas90 is found on. When IT gets alerted disk space is low again, they can use another tool to identify the biggest files such as TreeSize. The free version is pretty good but the paid version has a feature called Top 100 Files that gives the 100 largest files in size order. One can point it to the whole drive or just the \mas90 folder and therein look for culprit files.

If it on a separate partition, it's probably not the dump file. Google spacemonger.exe best disk space visualizer available. They bury it but there is a free version available

I've used WinDirStat in the past and it works well, and is #FOSS.