SQL Server 2008 Profiler Doubles Space When Captured as a File

  • I started a profile last night before leaving work, and made sure I had plenty of room on my C: drive to capture the trace files. I had 109 GB free. When I came in, I had a message saying that the C: drive is very low on disk space, and that Profiler could not capture any more data. All I could do was stop the trace at that point. The odd thing is that as soon as I shut Profiler down, 54 GB became available. That's the exact size of all the trace files too. The trace files were still there, but I have no idea what was holding on to the other 54 GB.

    I don't know if it's Profiler doubling the size, or Windows.

    Specs:

    Windows Server 2008 64-bit

    2-Xeon Quad-Core (2.53 GHz)

    12GB RAM

    SQL Server 2008 Dev. Ed. 64-bit

    16-drives all configured RAID-0 (It's only being used for performance testing)

    C: 2-drives; OS/SQL Binaries/Page file

    D: 6-drives; MDF files only

    E: 4-drives; LDF files only

    F: 4-drives; TEMPDB MDF file

  • I have an educated guess:-). I didn’t check it, but if I understand how the profiler works then most chances are that this is what happened. If you use the GUI to store the information in files instead of using a server side trace, then the profiler stores the information in the files as you requested, but also showes it in the GUI on the screen. Since you had 54GB of data, it had to use a file for the GUI because it couldn’t store 54GB of data in the memory. When you shut down the profiler, it deleted the file that it was using.

    Adi

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  • Thanks for the quick reply. I was using the Profiler GUI on the server itself through a Remote Desktop session. I've never run it non-GUI, but if that solves my problem, then thank you!

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