Trimming LAN Manager Server Service to Tune Applications

MORE INFORMATION

To set the memory usage of server service, open the Network tool in Control Panel, and double-click the entry for Server. A dialog box will show four selections:

• Minimize Memory Used
• Balance
• Maximize Throughput for File Sharing
• Maximize Throughput for Network Applications

These settings effect several internal server buffers and table allocation sizes (number of request buffers, etc.) and rules (minimum number of pre-allocated memory objects for new connections, and so forth). The latter two settings have the same regulations for server service but effect the system cache size.

If you do not have any clients connecting to server service except remote administration, you can set it to Minimize; if there are only a few clients you can set it to Balance.

Here is a list of application services that benefit from changing this setting to Minimize Memory Used:

• RAS Server
• Services for Macintosh
• DHCP Server
• WINS Server
• Internet Information Server
• Domain Name Service (DNS) Server (Windows NT 4.0 only)
• Microsoft File and Print Services for NetWare (also has a memory size setting)
• Microsoft Site Server
• Microsoft Commercial Internet Services
• Other application servers, like SAP R/3 server and Oracle SQL server (uses Sockets) or Lotus Notes server (uses NETBIOS)

These services can also be optimized this way if the clients do not connect to it with Named Pipes:

• Microsoft SNA Server (IPX and TCP sockets available since versions 2.1x)
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft Systems Management Server
• Microsoft Exchange Server
• Microsoft Transaction Server
• Microsoft Message Queue Server

Services and functions that suffer from the customization to Minimize Memory Used are:

• Windows NT File and Print Services for Microsoft Network Clients
• Windows NT Primary Domain Controllers
• Windows NT Backup Domain Controllers

The problems you might experience when you configure the Server service for too little memory are intermittent connection failures (for example, "not enough server memory to process this request"), or problems connecting (for example, "server refused the connection").

In one instance, this setting was changed to Minimize on an R/3 server with Oracle database; the time for the database import was reduced by 30 percent.