Choosing the DTC Log File Location

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Applies To: Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server Technical Preview, Windows Vista

On Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows NT, the log file is placed in the %windir%\system32\DTCLog directory by default. You may find that you can enhance your system by specifying a new location for the log file. The following guidelines give more detail:

  • Performance—On extremely high-performance transaction processing systems, you might want to place the DTC log file on a dedicated disk device or on a device with relatively little other traffic. However, on most systems, the DTC log file can be located on any disk with free space that is not in use excessively.

  • Reliability—You should put the DTC log file on a RAID-1 device for maximum reliability. Losing the DTC log file might cause the DTC to lose track of pending transactions. This could affect the data consistency of the transaction-protected databases, message queues, and files coordinated by the DTC.

    In RAID-1, log writes are made to both the primary disk and to a mirror copy. Because the writes are made concurrently, the elapsed time for log writes is little more than that for a write to a single device. Because DTC log writes are synchronous and sequential, they are ideally suited to RAID-1. RAID-1 is also ideal for the DTC log file because it provides fault tolerance. If one of the drives in the mirrored pair fails, DTC continues using the surviving disk drive.

    RAID-1 can be implemented through either hardware or software. Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 provide a software-based implementation of RAID-1. Using the software-based RAID-1 capability is usually sufficient because it imposes little processing overhead on your system.

  • Clustered systems—On a clustered system, the DTC log file must be located on a shared disk. This permits the DTC transaction manager to access the log file regardless of which cluster node it is running on.

See Also

DTC Log File Management
Resetting the DTC Log File (Component PSDK)
Restoring Damaged DTC Log Files