Windows 2012 Registry Problem
Here is something that I came upon recently in regards to Windows Server 2012 and performance issues. My home server runs Windows 2012 Server Essentials and the operating system is installed onto a Samsung 830 SSD. Performance was becoming a problem of lately. There were noticeable lag in opening up drives in Windows Explorer and other slight delays that I thought were related to the SSD drive. SSD drives can become slower as they near capacity. Even if you delete a lot of large files to free up space, the trim feature still needs time to run and free up space. This means that if you have an SSD at 85% capacity and you delete files to bring it down to 50%, the SSD still has 85% allocated until the trim feature has a few hours of uninterrupted time to run.
After further investigation, I found that trying to open Control Panel – Hardware – Devices and Printers would not even display at all. Next I looked at Device Manager to see if there were any issues there. I did not see any problems with items listed in Device Manager. However after clicking on View – Show Hidden Devices, I found thousands of entries for Storage Volume Shadow Copies and the same for Storage Volumes. There were also a large number of USB devices that I had used in the past. The Windows registry stores all these previous entries and over time, never removes them. I uninstalled the old USB devices, but for the shadow copies and storage volumes, I found that this problem is most likely due to normal usage of Remote Desktop and other Windows services. To remove them manually would take a very long time.
Microsoft has a utility for this issue. Microsoft DevNodeClean can be run on Windows Server 2003 and newer operating systems. In fact, you will need to most likely run this utility weekly if the issue persists. To run the command, use an elevated CMD Prompt and type:
devnodeclean /n
After restarting the server, this resolved the performance issues and I could open up Devices and Printers again.