Ever since my grandpas company was nice to pay for a license for me to give me a VLK Edition of Windows Server 2003 it has been awefully slow.

it's as if the system has viruses from the start.

I have a server with 512MB of ram
I have 100GB of hard drive space
I use virtual ram of 512MB.
I have 3ghz of processor speed.

It just acts slow, can't take apache, and it keeps slowing down quickly

Can you help me speed this thing up?

Have you defragged it? Disk check? Virus scan? Is your HD full?
Tell us what you have already done so we can make suggestions.

I see 1 thing in those specs that could be a problem:

Windows Server 2003

Ok, jokes apart, you may want to try a bit more ram. 512Mo is really small, even for a desktop computer.

Second, try maybe to downgrade to windows 2000.
I don't know what is different between those , but you can run apache the same way, and I'm sure w2k is less demanding upon ram and cpu than w2k3

Third, try to monitor a bit was is slowing you.
Is that an application running 100% cpu, the paging file (swap) that goes up ?
If so, maybe it's an application that grows and take all the ram..

I'd say that for a server, no swap should be used.
I disabled any swap on my linux server, because when it starts to swap, it's the beginning of bigger problems.
And if a server starts to swap, it will spend 2/3 of its time to read datas from the swap, or copy ram segment in the swap.

I prefer the server to stop serving it's purpose, but stay up, rather than reaching a state where I cannot log to it anymore, and have to ask a sysadmin from my hoster to reset it (I'm operating a XEN vps)

Originally Posted by tripy

I see 1 thing in those specs that could be a problem:

Ok, jokes apart, you may want to try a bit more ram. 512Mo is really small, even for a desktop computer.

Second, try maybe to downgrade to windows 2000.
I don't know what is different between those , but you can run apache the same way, and I'm sure w2k is less demanding upon ram and cpu than w2k3

Third, try to monitor a bit was is slowing you.
Is that an application running 100% cpu, the paging file (swap) that goes up ?
If so, maybe it's an application that grows and take all the ram..

I'd say that for a server, no swap should be used.
I disabled any swap on my linux server, because when it starts to swap, it's the beginning of bigger problems.
And if a server starts to swap, it will spend 2/3 of its time to read datas from the swap, or copy ram segment in the swap.

I prefer the server to stop serving it's purpose, but stay up, rather than reaching a state where I cannot log to it anymore, and have to ask a sysadmin from my hoster to reset it (I'm operating a XEN vps)

I was planning on upgrading to 1GB of ram, or more.

I was needed some answers to why it was slow.

I thought it wasn't the ram cause it said I had over 300000 free in task manager but I didn't think about swap memory. It would take a lot.

Like if I leave firefox running for a while and then go back to it, it runs really slow and sometimes I have to 'end task' it just to fix the problem.

Well, as far as I know, the windows task manager gives you the totally free space, but this include the swap file.
So, when it tolds you that 300Mo are free on a 512Mo machine, you may already have used 200Mo of swap.

And, firefox 2 is know to have a BIG memory issue, and that with time, it takes always more and more memory.
I ususally have to kill it 2/3 times a day on my winxp box (at work) and it's always reported as being more than 700Mo in ram.
This problem seemed less prominent on my linuxes boxes though...

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_m...usage_(Firefox)
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/memusage.html

quite often, people do not restart servers very often. its highly recommended to restart your server (or any computer for that matter) at least once a week in my opinion, just to clear the RAM & cache, you will find that once restarted, the system will run like a dream.

if you have done that and it still plays up, i would recommend doing a scan disk and defrag, download AVG anti virus & AVG anti spyware, and do full scans with both. that should sort it right out for you