We have Altiris Notification Server with a few solutions for about 15 months now. Currently NS manages 1500 client PCs. Altiris provides great solutions and they are very easy to modify for your environment. But a few months ago I discovered two problems that took me some time to investigate...
The first problem was quite easy and straight forward:
IIS log files were in the region of 8 Gb. One day I received an alert message that Notification Server hosting machine is running out of space on the drive C:\.
After looking at folders and files size I have found that IIS log files were in the region of 8 Gb. These log files are created by IIS, but are never deleted.
I have asked people who have more knowledge in IIS than I do and they told me that there is no mechanism in IIS to automatically clean up log files.
Solution for problem one:
To sort this out I have scheduled a quarterly task to delete all files that are more than month old from: C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\W3SVC1
The second problem took some time and investigation:
On Notification Server hosting machine, process w3wp.exe was constantly using 50-70 of CPU time even when Notification Server was not busy at all.
I was looking at different configuration settings, was monitoring events and queues without any luck. And then I found that folder \Program Files\Altiris\Notification Server\NSCap\Temp has almost one million files in it, despite the fact that total folder size is 0 Mb.
In this folder Notification Server stores all the inventory files that have been processed, they are empty but still kept there. Notification Server does not delete these *.tmp files and does not use them after files placed in this folder.
I have confirmed with our Altiris Support engineer that these files are not used by Notification Server and I deleted them all. As soon as I deleted these files, w3wp.exe CPU usage has dropped to a few percent. CPU usage spikes up to about 30 percent when I run a task or big report, but these are very short spikes.
Overall, Notification Server hosting machine is more "happy" now and inventories from clients are processed more quickly.
Solution for problem two:
To sort this out I have scheduled a monthly task to delete all files from: \Program Files\Altiris\Notification Server\NSCap\Temp
It well maybe just me, who had these problems, but I decided to share my experience just in case it saves time for someone else.