Vssvc.exe

The problem with mucking around with services is that a lot of services are dependent on others. Sometimes, disabling a service may cause other services not to work. And you will probably waste hours of time trying to figure out WHY the service you want to work is not doing so.

This is what MS says about the VSS service:

Manages and implements Volume Shadow Copies used for backup and other purposes. If this service is stopped, shadow copies will be unavailable for backup and the backup may fail. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.

I fail to see why you are worried about a lousy 6MB of memory usage. Was this REAL memory that it was occupying or VIRTUAL (swapped out on the paging file)? Did you notice any increase in performance when you disabled this file? Show us what you gained.

Well the main benefit besides the 6 Megabytes of RAM is that you do not have something running in the background that you do not need.

And WHY is that a benefit Martin?

I can tell you from much experience, turning stuff off that you THINK you don’t need will come back to bite you. Particularly Windows system programs.

This stuff does not matter when you are running Win/XP SP2 or Vista. Let Windows do the management and focus on more productive work that will provide a return on investment of time. Saving 6MB is meaningless.

It might be meaningless for you but not for me and a lot of other users. If you want to waste resources do it, I prefer to save them for more important matters.

I understand your viewpoint Martin. But you are not doing a good job of explaining WHY you feel wasting time on things like this is important or useful for the average person who may be reading your blog.

In order to do so, you would have to quantify gains that you received or anticipate receiving. And I don’t think that you have done this or could show that you have actually gained anything from your efforts [shrug].

IMO, the performance gain from disabling VSS is imperceptible, and it is better to leave it on. If I am not wrong, the ‘previous version’ option on Vista Business also works only if VSS is enabled

Also, when defragmenting VSS enabled volumes, the use of a VSS-compatible defragmenter can help preserve shadow copies. VSS incompatible defrag may be slightly faster, but can mess with the disk space and/or shadow copies. I know that Diskeeper 2008 has the VSS defrag option; don’t know if there are any others.

Jojo, I think you fail to understand the power of stacking, 6MB here and 6MB there adds up to a lot of needless MB’s!

You can gain massive performance by culling out the needless processes but if you just “shrug” and shy away from it you will never realize those gains. Careful examination and removal of those tiny little leaches can save you a lot of memory, especially on an OS like Vista that sucks up so much already.

Kill it if you don’t need it.

Just a late follow up to this. I’ve disabled Volume Shadow Copy service in Visata for a while now. Than today, I wanted to create a Restore Point before installing a driver. And guess what, I had no prior Restore Points. Apparently, Volume Shadow Copy service needs to be running in order to create Restore Points. Oh well, it’s now back on Automatic Startup.