Windows Server 2003 includes support for a startup switch that lets you tune the allocation of use of memory and memory address space. Regardless of the amount of physical memory in your system, Windows uses a virtual address space of 4 GB, with 2 GB allocated to user-mode processes (for example, applications) and 2 GB allocated to kernel-mode processes (for example, the operating system and kernel-mode drivers). On systems that have 1 GB or more of physical memory, the startup switche can be used to allocate more memory to applications (3 GB) and less memory to the operating system (1 GB). This additional virtual address space helps reduce the amount of memory fragmentation.

How beneficial is it ?

You may have read many articles on this subject before. This discussion has been going on for many years now and at times has almost reached epic proportions due to the conflicting information available from Microsoft. Long story short is that by and large, you should NOT use the /3GB switch unless you meet specific criteria, please read the following article as it demystifies the whole theory. Or read the excerpt below.

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/23/memory-management-demystifying-3gb.aspx

The /3GB option was intended as a short term solution to allow applications such as database servers to maintain more data in memory than a 2GB address space allowed. However, using the /3GB method to increase the user-mode memory space comes at a cost. If we have to allocate an additional 1GB of this address space to the user-mode space, then the System space is cut in half. Drivers, Heap, Paged & NonPaged Memory all have only half the resources to work with now. However, because of the way memory mapping works, cutting the kernel space in half does a lot more than just reducing the address space. Many of the structures within the kernel virtual memory space are cut back by far more than 50%.

For a process to access the full 3GB address space, the image file (application process) must have the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag set in the image header.

If the flag is not set in the image header, then the OS reserves the third gigabyte so that the application won’t see virtual addresses greater than 0x7FFFFFFF. You set this flag by specifying the linker flag /LARGEADDRESSAWARE when building the executable. This flag has no effect when running the application on a system with a 2-GB user address space. Therefore if you enable the /3GB switch, then applications that do not have this flag set can only use the standard 2GB of User mode memory, and the Kernel is still limited to the 1GB space – which means that 1GB of virtual memory is basically wasted !

All that is required to make it happen is a switch in the boot.ini file. The switch, /3GB, is placed
at the end of the line that executes the WinNT loading process.

Example:

[operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows NT
Server Version 4.00" /3GB

Or you may add an additional line in your boot.ini as above to have the option to boot into either environment, with or without the switch.

What to keep in mind ?

This topic deals with the the virtual memory address space and has no relevance with the physical memory, it is however a limitation of a 32bit OS if you are running 64bit OS this not applicable. At the end of the day you must decide if your application is capable of handling this switch as an added benefit. Often times, if you are having to up the threshold of your OS handling of things and or things such as over-clocking your processor to keep up, one might worry about the logic behind it. Perhaps go for 64bit OS to begin with.

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Uptime.exe can be used to display the current uptime of the local or remote system. Optionally, it can also scan the Event log for key system events such as system restart or computers that are not responding (hanging). Where possible, it also calculates system availability. It is primarily intended for Windows NT Server 4.0 Service Pack 4 or later, though it operates in limited fashion on earlier versions.

You can download it from the link below and drop it on the root of the c:\ or where you wish and the command line to run is simply uptime

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232243

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We are quite a big environment as we have little over 1000 AD defined subnets and only 80 some had been populated in the reverse lookup zones. I was tasked to make sure that all the reverse zones are created in our DNS from the defined subnets. As it could be very tedious task, I wanted to automate the process. I am not a scriptor but I knew that we could not be the only who has had this issue and I tried digging the newsgroups/blogs/forums and the internet in general but I had no or little luck finding any relevant information.

I started off looking into ADSIedit, as I wanted the export the subnet objects and then somehow import them back into the DNS. I knew that there was DNSCMD command line utility that allows you to do various tasks for zones/records creations, deletion and modification. Unfortunately it did not have a very wide syntax that allowed to pipe-in a list from an external source such a CSV file (that would have the subnets I export from AD). As expected the export part went fine and I had the full list of all the AD defined subnets. Now I was struggling to find a VBscript I could wrap this file into and pipe-in thru DNSCMD like utility.

I looked at Joeware free AD utilites, and I saw Joe had a tool called ADfind. I decided to query him and I got a rapid reply back from him with some suggestions, he assured me it is doable using his ADfind utility combined with some other script or utility. In mean time he forwarded my query to Dean Wells of MSEtechnology who emailed me a rather quick solution using Joe’s ADfind tool (see below). I was extremely pleased how my easy attempt to query seasoned scriptors had paid off.

Apart from other great writing and consulting achievements both Joe Richards and Dean Wells are Micrsoft MVPs and their voluntary efforts to help out the community truly exhibited what MVP program is all about.

So here is the command you would run at your DNS server to accomplish this task;

for /f "tokens=1,2,3 delims=." %n in ('adfind -config -rb "CN=Subnets,CN=Sites" -f "objectclass=subnet" name -list') do @dnscmd /zoneadd %p.%o.%n.in-addr.arpa /primary

add ‘ds’ in front of the primary (/dsprimary) if you wish to make the zones AD integrated

NOTES from Dean
-If you place the syntax above within a batch file, please note that any occurrence of a ‘%’ symbol must be replaced with ‘%%’ (two of them)
-ADfind and DNSCMD must both exist within the current directory or the system path
-In its current form, the syntax assumes the subnet is comprised of 3 octets

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You don’t have to sign-up for the service if you already have an hotmail or msn account. Just go here after you log-in to your hotmail/msn account and reserve your space.

I myself have a public folder space now which I intend to use to publish Microsoft related evals/software and documentation.

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AD Domains and Trusts
domain.msc

Active Directory Management
admgmt.msc

AD Sites and Serrvices
dssite.msc

AD Users and COmputers
dsa.msc

ADSI Edit
adsiedit.msc

Authorization manager
azman.msc

Certification Authority Management
certsrv.msc

Certificate Templates
certtmpl.msc

Cluster Administrator
cluadmin.exe

Computer Management
compmgmt.msc

Component Services
comexp.msc

Configure Your Server
cys.exe

Device Manager
devmgmt.msc

DHCP Managment
dhcpmgmt.msc

Disk Defragmenter
dfrg.msc

Disk Manager
diskmgmt.msc

Distributed File System
dfsgui.msc

DNS Managment
dnsmgmt.msc

Event Viewer
eventvwr.msc

Indexing Service Management
ciadv.msc

IP Address Manage
ipaddrmgmt.msc

Licensing Manager
llsmgr.exe

Local Certificates Management
certmgr.msc

Local Group Policy Editor
gpedit.msc

Local Security Settings Manager
secpol.msc

Local Users and Groups Manager
lusrmgr.msc

Network Load balancing
nlbmgr.exe

Performance Montior
perfmon.msc

PKI Viewer
pkiview.msc

Public Key Managment
pkmgmt.msc

QoS Control Management
acssnap.msc

Remote Desktops
tsmmc.msc

Remote Storage Administration
rsadmin.msc

Removable Storage
ntmsmgr.msc

Removalbe Storage Operator Requests
ntmsoprq.msc

Routing and Remote Access Manager
rrasmgmt.msc

Resultant Set of Policy
rsop.msc

Schema management
schmmgmt.msc

Services Management
services.msc

Shared Folders
fsmgmt.msc

SID Security Migration
sidwalk.msc

Telephony Management
tapimgmt.msc

Terminal Server Configuration
tscc.msc

Terminal Server Licensing
licmgr.exe

Terminal Server Manager
tsadmin.exe

UDDI Services Managment
uddi.msc

Windows Mangement Instumentation
wmimgmt.msc

WINS Server manager
winsmgmt.msc

Enjoy !

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