Monitoring and Reducing DTC Log File Disk I/O Contention

The Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) log file can become a disk I/O bottleneck in transaction-intensive environments. This is especially true when using adapters that support transactions, such as SQL Server, MSMQ, or MQSeries, or in a multi-MessageBox environment. Transactional adapters use DTC transactions, and multi-MessageBox environments make extensive use of DTC transactions.

Monitoring Usage in Clustered and Non-Clustered Environments

To ensure that the DTC log file does not become a disk I/O bottleneck, you should monitor the disk I/O usage for the disk where the DTC log file resides on the SQL Server database server.

In an environment where SQL Server is clustered, this is not as much of a concern because the log file will already be on a shared drive, which will likely be a fast SAN drive with multiple spindles. You should nevertheless still monitor the disk I/O usage since it can become a bottleneck in non-clustered environments or when the DTC log file is on a shared disk with other disk-intensive files.

Troubleshooting DTC

For information about troubleshooting DTC, see "Troubleshooting Problems with MSDTC" in BizTalk Server Help at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=153237.

See Also

Checklist: Configuring Windows Server