Home Forums Discussions Problems AC slows to crawl as amazingcharts.service.winservice.e xe grows

Did you mean WD RE4 SATA drives?

No I meant SAS. But both exist and there's literally a one letter difference in the model numbers.

Side note: Western Digital dropped the '4' from "RE4". They are just called "RE" = RAID Edition now.

So the WD RE comes in two flavors: SAS and SATA

WD2000FYY[b]G[/b] - WD RE 2TB [b]SAS[/b]
WD2000FYY[b]Z[/b] - WD RE 2TB [b]SATA[/b]

There's typically a 50-60 dollar difference between the SAS and SATA. The RE4 2TB SATA appears to be on sale at only $170.

There are of course larger and smaller capacities, but I'll leave those for you guys to find.

The Seagate equivalent would be the Constellation which also comes in SATA and SAS flavors.

It's a weird balance where WD dominates the SMB market with the RE line. While Seagate's 15K SAS line is legendary in the enterprise space.

Well, it was a long time coming, but the symptoms have gone away. I was tempted to say we had solved the problem, which technically is true, but I have no idea which thing we did, or if it was the combination. Here is a brief recap of before & after:

Before:
[list]
[*]SBS server 2011 running on ThinkServer Td230 with a Xeon E5620, 2.4ghz, 8 core processor, 12G memory, and plenty of disk space.
[*] Ac running in VM with 6G memory.
[*] System response was adequate until about Nov. 13.
[*] the only specific issue I could find was the title of this post: AC slows to crawl as amazingcharts.service.winservice.exe grows
[*] spent hours on the phone with AC tech support: they recommended more memory which was done without much change
[*] tech support couldn't come up with a reason the service consumed so much memory. The only penalty to stopping the service was that I had to do backups manually.
[*] I contracted with an SQL expert. After a couple of hours poking around, his only recommendations were to leave the service stopped and automate the backup with an external program. Also to manually apply the windows server 2008 updates inside the vm.
[*] Since, by now there were also just general server response time issues, I kept looking.
[*] Another sever person noted that sbs$monitoring uses a lot of memory, but is not needed (something about a more user-friendly version of the event log)
[*] Stopping that freed up about 2G of memory, and all of a sudden, response time improved noticeably.
[*] With that encouragement, and an AC tech telling me that less than 5% of installations use a vm, I decided it was time to go mainstream.
[*] By appointment, the AC tech did a great job of helping me move the AC out of the VM (actually, he did the work & I watched.)
[*] system responsiveness vastly improved
[*] additional improvements came from cleaning up log files on the system drive.

After
[*] same box, 16G memory
[*] hyper-v and WSUS uninstalled
[*] I haven't seen memory utilization above 8G
[*] the amazingcharts.service.winservice.exe seems to be happy with 30M of memory (vs. the 500M to 750M it took up in the "before" environment.
[*] No more complaints from the users!!!
[*]