Windows Server 2012
A Microsoft server operating system that supports enterprise-level management, data storage, applications, and communications.
1,649 questions
Windows Server - ServiceProfiles folder (Branchcache) filling up - what caused it?
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Greg Dent
1
Reputation point
Recently, and inexplicably, almost all of my Windows Server 2012R2 servers (and some 2016) have spammed out alerts on their C: drives completely filling up. Fortunately I got to them before the servers crashed and burned, and figured out what it was.
Basically, branchcache has somehow enabled itself on all of my servers (I didnt turn it on) and started filling up the C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles folder up with absolute trash data - like a virus. It apparently has no cap on storage consumption, and does not clean itself up. Some of these folders are small (only a few GB). Some of them are insane (50+GB).
Easy to resolve by running "netsh branchcache flush" from an elevated command line.
My question is, why has this suddenly started happening, what is it doing, and why has Microsoft decided that our servers need to keep all this rubbish? I have to now keep running this branchcache flush command to keep my servers simply from crashing and burning. I don't know if anyone told MS, but filling the C: drive up to capacity WILL kill the server. Who thought this was a good system?
Is there a GPO setting I can configure to disable this specific part of branchcache, and is there any reason it actually turned itself on? I've worked with branchcache before, but only on file servers, or local caching servers where I specifically set it up. I have no idea what this is and why it's turned on. Hoping its not one of my colleagues doing some black ops.
Many thanks!
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Carlos Solís Salazar 18,181 Reputation points MVP2022-07-18T22:30:32.57+00:00 Thank you for asking this question on the **Microsoft Q&A Platform. **
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Greg Dent 1 Reputation point
2023-08-11T10:19:53.56+00:00 We are also experiencing this issue. This is not specific to any version - its happening on all our servers, from 2012R2 to 2022.
We use SCCM, which also has its own cache folder (ccmcache) which sometimes does similar nonsense, and wont clean itself up despite the SCCM/MCM client settings setting a max limit to 5GB.
Branchcache seems to have turned itself on and it filling up with junk. Exact same issue as you - it suddenly just started happening one day and we got hundreds of alerts for C: drive being full up and its all branchcache!
We made sure this is disabled in the SCCM client policy, but its either being ignored or branchcache is doing something else.
Can anyone comment on this?
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