I have 4 Windows 2008 servers that are using DFS to replicate data for web sites, approximately 75GB worth of storage. The issue that I am having is the dfsrs.exe is using anywhere from 1.5-3.5 GB of RAM. Is there any changes that I can make to reduce the amount of RAM that DFS uses?

I have 4 Windows 2008 servers that are using DFS to replicate data for web sites, approximately 75GB worth of storage. The issue that I am having is the dfsrs.exe is using anywhere from 1.5-3.5 GB of RAM. Is there any changes that I can make to reduce the amount of RAM that DFS uses?

DFS does not use file system buffering since 2008 but it does allocate memory for internal buffers and database thing. You may wish to take a look at performance tuning guide for DFS here:

Tuning DFS for performance

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2010/03/31/tuning-replication-performance-in-dfsr-especially-on-win2008-r2.aspx

"

• DFSR can become bound by RAM availability on busy hub servers, especially when using the registry performance values above. There is absolutely no reason to run a 32-bit file server in this day and age, and with the coming of Windows Server 2008 R2, its no longer possible. For spoke servers that tend to have far less load, you can cut more corners of course; the ten-user sales team in Hicksville doesnt need 16GB of RAM in their file server.

As a side note, customers periodically open cases to report memory leaks in DFSR. What we discuss is that DFSR intentionally caches as much RAM as it can get its hands on really though, its the ESE(Jet) database doing this. So the idler other processes on a DFSR server are, the more memory a DFSR process will be able to gobble up. You can see the same behavior in LSASSs database on DCs."

Good luck with that!

Thanks for the response, I went into the registry as suggested by the provided link and the DFS settings are not showing up.

• Edited by Kenji Kenji 11 hours 32 minutes ago

Hi,

I also do not have "Settings" under Parameters. From this article, keys come with hotfixes and we need to manually add that key in order to get a hotfix to work:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/968429

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/975763

However in your situation it seems not be an issue that DFSR is using large RAM - whether you have a high speed network connection between your replication targets? If it is high enough (or actually too high compare with the data it needs to replicate), you can try to set a threshold value in schedule - see if it will use less RAM with lower replication speed.