Want Better Performance? Clean Up Your WSUS Database

If you’re running into performance issues with your WSUS server, your first step should be to investigate the WSUS database to see if it’s the cause of the errors. If you’re lax with maintenance, the database could be filled with unneeded and unnecessary updates, which can significantly slow down performance.

The issue many administrators face is that properly maintaining the WSUS database can be time-intensive. (Microsoft advises monthly maintenance and lists it’s recommended tasks in a 17-page document!). Too often, those responsible will set up and configure the servers and then only perform maintenance when something goes wrong.

However, proactively removing old, obsolete or superseded updates from the WSUS database will make a big difference in the overall operation of the system and can prevent time wasted trying to troubleshoot issues. With WAM, our fully automated WSUS maintenance software, shrinking the database is easy as it runs daily, ensuring that your servers are always properly maintained. 

Our software was built to run in the background, and it will optimize the WSUS database (which can increase operation speed up to 1,500 times), decline multiple types of updates, remove obsolete updates as well as compress update revisions. 

When first running our software, customers are often amazed at how much space they can free up in their WSUS database, even after they think they’ve been doing the maintenance with the server cleanup wizard. We post customer removal records over 300GB and currently, our first place award is at 1636.88GB of space freed. Shrinking the database that much has an instant (and dramatic) effect on performance.

In addition to ease of use, the next best thing about WAM is its affordability. Licenses start at only $90 USD a year for a single/upstream license, which works out to less than $8 a month — that’s less than buying a coffee every day for a week!

Easily purchase WAM online and save time on WSUS maintenance.

At AJ Tek, our vision is to make IT simple and automated for other IT professionals. Our flagship product is WAM, WSUS Automated Maintenance. This system performs all of the tasks that a WSUS Administrator needs to do to maintain WSUS properly only leaving the approving of updates and reporting to the WSUS Administrator.

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