Oh... I just realized you wanted me to delete the entire SoftwareDistribution hierarchy... Previously I was only clearing out the datastore\Logs\ files in addition to datastore.edb.
Found a SBS03 server that uses Microsoft's update servers with a 162 MB datastore.edb. Deleting and rebuilding the datastore.edb reduced it to 152 MB. Deleted all SoftwareDistribution\ folders and datastore.edb rebuilt to 152 MB again. So there's no apparent improvement from taking out all of SoftwareDistribution vs. just the datastore.edb file. But I'm still thinking, 170 MB datastore,.edb on XP Pro is abominably large. And I should have gotten some minor improvement on the problem machine as I've seen with every other machine I've rebuilt a datastore.edb on, but maybe that only happens if some MS software has been uninstalled. So anyone else? If you have a a well-used XP Pro with lots of MS products installed that uses MS's update servers, what is your \Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\Datastore.edb file size? Carl From: Carl Houseman [mailto:c.house...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 10:59 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Automatic Updates has humongous datastore.edb and memory consumption The problem machine isn't local, but I found a local machine with a 80MB datastore.edb. Deleted the datastore.edb file and let it rebuild, it rebuilt to 33 MB. Then I deleted the datastore.edb and the logs folder, and it rebuilt to the same 33 MB size. But I'll give your idea a try next time I have face time at the machine. On my Windows 7 x64, I had a datastore.edb, deleted it, and it also rebuilt to 33 MB. Coincidence, or result of both machines accessing the same WSUS server? The problem machine is using Microsoft's update servers. Carl From: James Rankin [mailto:kz2...@googlemail.com] Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 3:42 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Automatic Updates has humongous datastore.edb and memory consumption Does it make any difference if you clear out the whole SoftwareDistribution directory? This is a tactic utilised in one of our AU cleanup scripts which our desktop guys claim helps out. On 6 August 2010 03:40, Carl Houseman <c.house...@gmail.com> wrote: Looking at an XP Pro SP3 desktop yesterday/today and soon after booting, the startup of the Automatic Updates service (wuauserv) is just killing it, using up all RAM and stalling everything due to all the swapping. Machine has only 512MB, but this is not a question that must be answered with "add memory" until I understand what is going on with Automatic Updates. Looking at the \Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb file, that file is about 170MB, and not coincidentally, 170MB is the peak VM size I saw for both wuauclt.exe and the svchost.exe used by wuauserv. So I stopped wuauserv, renamed the datastore.edb, started up wuauserv and did a wuauclt /detectnow, and it created a new datastore.edb of the same 170 MB size as before. Looking at my own XP machine, datastore.edb is about 6 MB. And, I'm not finding much with google for "large datastore.edb" or "huge datastore.edb". The usual AU problem has been pegged CPU, but the CPU isn't pegged because of all the swapping. Anybody? TIA, Carl ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
