Copying large file to remote server causes it to run out of physical memory

I have a strange issue that appears to have started recently.

When I copy a large file (Approx 6GB) from my laptop to one of our older fileservers the server runs out of memory after a few seconds.

This has only started recently, maybe since patch Tuesday although I can't be sure.

This server is a Windows 2000 sp4 machine, its a Dell 2950 with 1GB ram (Note: I am sure this server had more than 1GB!, I can't physically check until the end of the day when I can power it down), 3GHz Xeon proc, 4 x 250Gb 7.5k RPM SATA drives in raid 10 and a 1 Gigabit NIC connected to a 1GB port on an intel managed switch.

(Apparently I can't post images so a link will have to do)

Memory usage graph + info during copy

As soon as I stop the copy the memory instantly frees up:

Memory usage graph + info right after copy stopped

I've removed the antivirus which made had no impact. I've changed the "File and Print Sharing for Microsoft Networks" options to balanced.

We have another server, Windows 2000 SP4 with 2GB Ram, 2.8Ghz Intel Quad Core, 6 x 300Gb 15k SAS in raid 10.

When I copy the same 6GB file here the amount of available memory doesn't change.

Is there anything else I can look at while the server is running? As it's in use and not really affected by small file copies I can't reboot it just yet.

Here is a screen shot of some perfmon counters I had open just as the server runs out of memory.

Perfmon counters during copy

Thanks
Gareth

I'm running into the same problem.

Trying to do a P2V conversion onto a 64-bit server running Windows Server 2008. Any of the normal file transfer methods for the VMDK file (which is 44GB) cause Windows on the destination server to run out of its 14GB RAM after a few minutes due to the file system caching.

Running the P2V conversion or file copy on a 32-bit server doesn't have this problem and memory usage stays reasonable.

Then trying to copy the VMDK file to the destination VMWare server has the same problem.

This page describe exactly what I'm seeing:

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/05/08/slow-large-file-copy-issues.aspx

Based on my work this AM ESEUtil seems to be the way to go. It wasn't as fast as I'd expected, but it didn't freak out Windows either.

The Windows FTP client uses a Temp file on C:\ before moving the file to the target destination. Beware! :-)

This is very frustrating.

I know this is a bit of a pain but have you tried a 3rd party file copy utility? Windows tends to be kind of dumb/slow about file copies sometimes. Lifehacker did a top 5 list of these utilities, try one of them out and see if you still have the same issue.

http://lifehacker.com/5280976/five-best-alternative-file-copiers

Also, like towo said, check your virtual memory settings. Best practice is that your pagefile should be x1.5 your memory (i.e. 1 GB mem = 1024 MB; 1024*1.5 = 1536 MB page file)