Software distribution folder server 2003

Do not worry about doing anything damaging to your computer. After all, this process only involves removing the historical information of the folder. So, expect for the update process to take more time that it used to, especially since WUAgent will have to check and create the Datastore information. Your email address will not be published. Ad blockers may interfere with some important blog features, such as comments, images, etc.

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Effective use of Disk Cleanup utilities will produce exponentially greater amounts of impact on disk management than worrying about the minimal content in the SoftwareDistribution folder.

The information you provided him, reinforcing bad information unfortunately available widespread throughout the net despite my best efforts to counteract, like in this thread , are destructive more than helpful, and remove critical information required for the efficient operation of Windows systems.

Windows XP systems have typically been around longer than Windows 7 systems and so they will have larger SoftwareDistribution folders 3 SPs instead of 1 for Windows 7 and numerous other updates.

And as mentioned before, if a user has Windows XP, they are more likely to have older hardware, meaning a smaller HD. The Disk Cleanup utility in Windows, in my experience, has been pretty useless. There are a few other simple troubleshooting steps, including looking at the text logs and event logs, but the majority of the issues are covered above. Anything outside of those steps, I typically recommend reimaging the machine as any other troubleshooting will probably take more than 20 minutes, which is the time it takes to reimage a machine.

There are certain cases where reimaging the machine is not an option, such as mission-critical devices, but that is not the majority of systems. I understand that you are an MVP on Software Distribution and most likely can figure out any issue within minutes, but for others it might be easier to reimage the machine and be done with it. I realize where you are coming from and if you were working for his company, you would do things differently.

But he is not you and does not have your competency with WSUS. I am a technical person by nature and prefer to troubleshoot issues so I can find the root cause to make sure they do not happen again. Others are not fortunate to have the time available to do this and must do what they can to get the user back up and running. Like I said, it is not a perfect world, but we do with what we have.

No, they will not, and the SoftwareDistribution folder does not contain service pack files beyond the transient period of time required for actual installation of that service pack. Note: I misspoke in my earlier post and have edited that post to change "30 days" to "10 days". Formatting the drive and reinstalling the Operating System is sometimes easier for some people than performing the proper procedures, but it's never an excuse. This forum provides support for a product that is designed for use in an environment with IT Professionals, so the working assumption is that all persons posting here are, in fact, IT Professionals.

To that point, my working premise is that all persons here possess the ability to understand, and have the professional obligation TO understand. This is not a consumer forum designed to help users with Automatic Updates or Microsoft Update, so I will not "dumb down" anything in this forum. When that lack of knowledge is apparent, its incumbent upon those who have that knowledge to properly educate that IT Professional -- and this is what I am doing.

Thank you both for your feedback. To clarify things a bit, the systems that are causing me pain are Windows Server servers. Updates are approved on a monthly basis and are configured to automatically install and reboot on a scheduled basis.

When the system in question has less than 1 GB of free space, that's a significant issue. So it seemed to me that the issue is that, for whatever reason, the update source are not cleaning up after they have been installed. The instances where I have stopped the service, deleted the folder structure and restarted the service significantly reduces the amount of space used by the folder even after performing a detection.

What are the downsides to deleting the Windows Update history? FYI - I'm getting pressured to move these folders and log files to another drive, which worries me but that's another discussion. Is there an alternative, such as a cleanup tool switch that will allow me to keep this folder content clean? I just moved our 6 GB swap file to a different partition to stablize the server giving me exactly 6. Usage in temp directories is minimal.

I cannot find a straight answer on how to clean up the winsxs directory. Unfortunately, Microsoft often doesn't listen to his customers. I wanted a clean install. I did the updates Why so much failed updates?? Anyway after doing all of them, I just wanted to clean Win updates and minimize the image I will create after that. This is just a matter of staying clean. Why windows folders are always so messy? No offense, but standard MS response to these issues seems to be similarly unhelpful.

I have been reading for days now, looking for ways to reduce the unreasonably large and continually growing footprint of Windows 7, without any real answers.

My Software Distribution folder is currently 1. That's completely unacceptable. The WinSxS folder is 6. My install is exactly 2 days old, and I have very few programs on top of it Microsoft Word and Photoshop are the main ones. Right now the install size is 17GB after employing every "best practice" tactic possible including not only everything discussed on these forums, but everywhere else on the internet that I can find, no kidding.

Yesterday it was The reality is these folders take up too much space, and users need an elegant way to deal with them. Reiterating what is unhelpful MS rhetoric in bold and italics to emphasize that it's all been said before isn't the answer. Best practice is to not create such clunky, inelegant OS systems, so "best practice" went out the window when we chose to install Win 7 etc.

What we need are workable solutions, and a willingness from those so empowered to find them. Rich, are you certain about this? Have you tried doing this yourself? Did you install a base image of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 released Spring ,. If you installed the RTM version of Windows 7, and then applied a year-and-a-half worth of updates to the machine in 2 days, then a 1. If you're short on free space, buy a bigger drive.

I have a different view coming from desktop administration. I try to keep the master image as small as possible to reduce bandwith and image times. I only delete the files inside the downloads folder under softwaredistribution. I test the image and make sure it works fine, so no need to uninstall the updates and I have a smaller desktop image size. Your point is well taken; however, 1. Fact is, on a Gigabit LAN backbone, 1. I am a professional audio engineer and work on a Macbook Pro with a solid state drive installed.

Needing both Windows7 and OSX for my job, I want both OS systems to be as efficient as possible and not slurping up my disk space like candy You seem to be saying that the folder regulates itself and it will reduce in size after 10 days or so. Am I understanding you correctly?

Garvin, when people come to a forum they are looking for help solving an issue. Not a condescending, asinine tirade detailing how people are whiners about disk space and gasoline in their fancy sports car.

Furthermore, I was intrigued by your arrogance and decided to look up your credentials In fact, I wondered how a CTO could post replies like that and still retain their position within the company. Then I looked up your company and I laughed so hard that I spit coffee all over my desk.

What did you edit that website with??? FrontPage 98? I can say that it makes my top 10 all-time list of things to NOT do when creating a website. Please spare the internet from your future incompetence of web programming. And the fact that you tell people that this thread has wandered excessively off-topic and they should go post somewhere else is frankly irritating.

That is exactly what this topic is about! The excessive disk space usage by the Windows OS! Just so all you people out there know, MVP means Microsoft Valued Professional which is a fancy term for someone that posts to the forum frequently. MVPs are independent of Microsoft, with separate opinions and perspectives, and are able to represent the views of the community members with whom they engage every day. So Mr. Garvin has no authority granted by the Microsoft Corporation to tell anyone anything.

Regarding the WinSXS directory, it is full of files you may or may not require to run applications that were designed for an older operating system. It is a. I find it hard to believe I need those files, but you never know. I can tell you that if you delete all the files in this folder, you will probably create yourself some issues with backward compatibility of applications designed for previous operating systems.

I will continue to research this issue and update my findings if they are helpful. For those of you that are using the AVG Internet Security toolbar, a bug was introduced in version 9.

It continues to do so in AVG The only way to get rid of it is to get rid of the AVG toolbar and then delete it. Also, you can use a folder migrating utility to move directories and files to a secondary hard drive. You can can also move the LocalLow and Roaming folders from AppData over to your secondary hard drive to keep some applications from writing to precious SSD space.

Unfortunately, moving the Local folder is extremely difficult and should be left alone unless you are comfortable with editing the registry.

And for those of you that would like a good laugh, stroll on over to Mr. Garvin's corporation website located at:.

That's not a "minimal amount of space" I have a 50 Gb partition and I can't expand it any more. My temp folders are empty and in a different disk drive, and I use the Disk Cleanup utility each and every day because I get constant warnings about my disk space running out.

I've even created scripts to delete Visual Studio debug and trace files, but that doesn't fix that my Windows folder is taking 30 out of my 50 Gbs Most of it comes from the WinSxS, Installer, Assembly and SoftwareDistribution subfolders. And lots of people like Lawrence keep saying that those folders CAN'T be touched, but they don't give an alternative solution The "use the Cleanup utility" solution makes me laugh.

In the end, I'll have to format and install everything all over again because Windows overfeeds with time and there's no real way of making it thiner Next time, I'll deactivate automatic Windows updates.

Oh wait! That's not 'best practice' either! I guess I'll just throw my laptop off the window, then. SD Downloads is auto cleaned after a couple of weeks. Purging more often than that can be done by stopping the service, clearing the downloads dir, then restarting WAU. You're still left with remnants of uninstalled programs MS and third party , plus various caches, duplicates etc. As has always been the case, an occasional clean reinstall from properly slipstreamed media is the best choice.

I came here looking for an answer to "why my softwaredistribution folder has 1. I agree with you, ElderJedi, except in that quoted thing. I think this topic is about a technical person living in his own world and real people trying to find answers in the real world. Thanks for the real answers chaps, stop service, delete folder, start service, jobs a good un.

Yes, I'm qualified, a global IT Manager and very tech savvy. Mr Lawrence needs to learn to calm the hell down - or at least phrase things differently. But - given the photo and website I have no idea which world you live in but in the real world, this folder gets absurdly bloated on even clean machines. I found this thread when looking for a reminder of which services to stop because my three week clean install of Windows 7 x64 has a 3GB SoftwareDistribution folder, something the IT company that I run sees all the times.

Ultimately, the user wasn't asking for advice on when or if he should empty this folder either - just a way to script it because it IS something that needs to be done regularly. Just when I thought nobody could beat my story, you did, Bob. I'll post it anyway -- I have a Windows Server R2 machine built only a year and a half ago.

All it does is run SQL Server. It now has 2. So yes, in the real world it does build up -- and it's also endangering the free disk space on that drive all the actual data is on another, large drive. And nearly half of that space is in a single file, dated a year ago. So no, the files don't necessarily get automatically deleted after 10 days. I hope I'm not going off topic but this is easily one of the most hilarious threads I've read in quite a while.

I was looking to clean up a recent XP install on a laptop with a 20GB drive. For a few of the posts there, I was starting to buy into the shpiel by Fred Garvin actually, you might want to goog that version of the name for another laugh and was resigned to just leaving the damn thing until it basically exploded.

Anyways, the one part of his advice I took was that I only deleted the contents of the download folder ten days be danged , and I went out there and deleted some of the other folders mentioned.

Everything seems to be running fine. I think the problem was that the guy's attitude blew up on his face. He was offering an option, and for some reason he chose to issue it as some sort of directive. Anyways, I can't stop laughing after seeing his site. One of the jokers in the office says it was made before the internet.

I have been reading various posts on this and, like this thread, there is controversy over the prudence of simply deleting them. Do any of you have any observations on that? It seems related to this thread, but perhaps not. From a clean install of Windows Server R2 Standard, with all updates incl. SP1 installed, it took 15,4 Gb footprint. So, I got back 4 Gb just by doing these two simple points, falling from 15,4 to 11,4 Gb footprint.

FYI ElderJedi, believe it. Net Framework timeframe, you might've seen those tags as well. Just like you may start seeing ARM tags once Win8 ships. At the risk of sounding pedantic, AMD is the one that added the x64 instruction extensions to the x86 chipset, since Intel was off playing with Itanium at the time.

When it was clear that the x86 architecture needed bit extensions i. Now, to bring this back on topic, don't delete those files from your WinSXS folder, especially if you're running a bit machine. Bad things will happen.

A senior programmer? A "Senior" would imply someone with knowledge and understanding in their field. I came to this thread to find out some information about the SoftwareDistribution folder and all I found was a bunch of children "member-measuring" in front of each other. ElderJedi, you resorted to abusing another member on the forum like a child and brought no value to the discussion at all. You talk about.

You have a bit processor in your i7 laptop, which is of AMD64 architecture. If I were your employer and read this post, I would be questioning your "senior" position as a programmer, who should know what AMD64 architecture is. As condescending as Lawrence's post may be, he is right. I couldn't find anything too wrong with anything he stated, as evangelistic as he is. You cannot recommend someone rebuild a server simply because Windows Update doesn't work. That is not and efficient way of thinking, especially when you mentioned the "destruction of data is never the correct answer" in the same breath.

When you have a corrupt Windows Update Repository Datastore, sometimes deleting this and allowing Windows Update to repopulate it is the best course of action. Onto the topic of discussion here. If you are deleting the SoftwareDistribution folder, recreating it and then pushing updates to it and wonder why it's growing If you are worried about space on your system drives, expand them. You are wasting your employers money playing cleanup duties on system drives when you should be solving real problems in your environment.

Sure I may not have added to this forum's topic, but just remember what this forum is "Social. It was never my intent to suggest that somebody should rebuild a server just to repair Windows Update in fact, totally to the contrary. I absolutely agree. I can see this discussion has been going on for a while.

I would have hoped someone from Microsoft or with an MS Support contract might have stepped in and cleared up the matter, but alas seems still left to people with although considerable experience, can't absolutely say for sure what to do about all these files. My main reason for wanting to nuke it is the malware scan is taking forever and I don't see any reason to keep old files that are no longer needed.

I'm going to delete everything prior to I hope I will be safe. But the other point is it seems Microsoft is being a bit sloppy in not doing a better job cleaning up after themselves - imho.

Full disclosure I'm running a Vista bit circa so I've had some time to build up files. But again, why can't Microsoft clean up after themselves better. The scans are taking forever to get through what no doubt is mostly garbage at this point. They should put more focus on their core products, OS and office productivity.

Their OS's still seem to have some glaring deficiencies. No, that's not the same issue. The WinSXS folder is a permanent archive and is designed to be that large on a system with years of patches applied.

It's why the disk space requirements for the OS are what they are. ITPros should learn the architecture and operation of the Operating System before becoming a critic. The fact that you're still running a Vista x64 system in speaks much more to the point than I think you may imagine. And how about to delete only particular folder under "SoftwareDistribution", Datastore? I'm trying to fix wuauclt.

If the performance improves, then perhaps, as the MS Answers thread from suggests - it was a defective data store -- however, given that time frame mid and on XP systems, I'm much more inclined to think it was the Office issue. Around that time frame, a number of systems with Office and 8 years of updates applied, and to a lesser extent even today, some Office systems that are approaching 5 years of updates applied, had performance issues because of the number of update packages in the MSI Installer folder.

For those systems the remediation was to uninstall Office or Office and then reinstall Office with the latest service pack, and then apply the remainder of the required Office patches. But not withstanding that possible scenario, the SD folder is merely a cache of what's on the WSUS server relevant to that particular client, so performance issues are almost always an effect of what's on the WSUS server.

You can search this forum for the keyword 'timeout' and find dozens of discussions of this condition. Your observations seem to make a lot of sense, though I don't pretend to fully understand especially the part about WSUS.

I have what I hope are two simple follow-up questions, one related to wuauclt my problem appears to be intense harddrive activity connected with wuauclt and one related to the possible Office reinstall fix. Re wuauclt, you mention in a different post the need to know what version is running. How do I find that out and what minimum version do I want? Does the fact that it says SP3 mean that my problem would likely not be solved by an Office reinstall?

It's logged at service startup in the WindowsUpdate. If files are in use and you cannot delete some files, then you should restart your device. Run the above command again after restarting. Now you will be able to delete files from Software Distribution folder on Windows After emptying this folder, you can either restart your computer or type the following command one by one in Command Prompt and press Enter to restart Windows Update related services:.

Best 2 ways to boot to Command Prompt Windows Open an elevated command prompt and type the following commands one after the other, and press Enter :. In conclusion, you can know how to delete Software Distribution Folder and how to rename it.