High Disk Write on server

Question

I have 2 identical servers and currently I am monitoring both of them by setting up performance counters.

• IIS 6 with .NET Framework 2

I am noticing that one server has high disk writes of ~3300 Writes/Sec and the other server has ~199 Writes/Sec

Anyone encountered the same problem?

What may cause high disk writes?

These servers are load balanced (50%-50%)

Thanks

Answer 1

Multiple issue can cause high disk writes, one of them is paging. is one of these server under high memory load

Answer 2

Lots of things can cause high disk activity.

• Swapping
• There's lots of stuff being written to disk
• You left ODBC tracing on (oops!)
• ...

Sounds like you're already using Performance Monitor; add some more counters to watch per process rather than systemwide:

• Process | IO Writes / sec
• Process | IO Written Bytes / sec
• Process | Page File Writes / sec

I'm not sure about the Page File Writes per second (this is from memory) but there should be something like that in there. You should be able to isolate the high activity to a process and that should help you figure it out.