Yes, it will affect performance as now there is less of your database cached in in the buffer.

Unless your next few requests also take data from that big long...

For those interested, yes, the defrag wasn't interested in something that big, it just said, this file could not be defragmented.

I backed up shrunk the log file stopped the server...

Thanks for all of your help, I have cetainly learnt a lot about sql server in the last few weeks. Disk fragmentation is also an issue (as in it exists)...

I would have thought a dbreindex on the whole database would have covered that? (correct me if I am wrong)

As well as that there is the maintenance plan running twice...

I would have thought a dbreindex on the whole database would have covered that? (correct me if I am wrong)

As well as that there is the maintenance plan running twice...

The big drop in performance was definitely noticed by the users. Unfortunately I hadn't done any baselining to see what IO was being done when everything was running well. The...