Groove clogging up memory

[Christina]

Hi,
we are a small business (3 people) who are using Groove. However, as we
started using a server as well, and signed up this server as an administrator
of the groove accounts (so that even if all users remove the Groove files
from their laptop, there is still a copy on the server), Groove quickly ate
up all the available memory on our server. As it is now, the folder
grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ is growing by about one GB per hour. This is the
case when there is only one user plus the server connected to the workspaces.
Why is this? Will the folder keep on groving indefinitely? How much space
are we supposed to have allocated to Groove (on each computer? on the
server?).
best regards,
Christina

 

[Frances Selkirk [MSFT]]

I am confused about what you are doing. Did you sign up for Groove Enterprise
Services (which seems unlikely for that few people) so that you could
automatically maintain backup copies of the Groove accounts, or did you, on
a separate "server" computer, create a Groove account to be a member of all
workspaces created by any of the three of you? Or something else entirely?

In general, Groove will take up more space when fewer members of a workspace
are available online, because it maintains a copy of all changes that have
been sent, but are not yet known to have been received by every endpoint
(member/computer) of a workspace.

If you provide me with more details on what you mean by "server" and what
are doing, I will try to figure out what is happening. (For reference, my
grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ folder is a little under 2 GB, but my largest
workspace is under 1 GB. I currently have 30 workspaces on this PC, but seven
of those are small test spaces.)

 

[Christina]

Frances,
We hae a separate (virtual) server running Microsoft Small Business Server.
This computer has a mailadress on its own and its own Groove account which is
a member
of all (we only have one) groove workspaces (we are using a file sharing
workspace). It was the server/administrator account which created the Groove
workspace and at present we have three members (the server and two
employees). This file sharing folder and subfolder make up about 1.6 GB,
whilst the groovebinaryfilestore made up about 15 GB before the server
crashed (after just having run the workspace for a few days). We then started
from the beginning again, with only 2 users, the server plus one employee,
but it still clogs up quite a number of GB of memory.
Does it make a difference who creates the workspace (i.e. should I create it
on my computer and then invite the server instead of vice versa)?
Best regards,
Christina

I am confused about what you are doing. Did you sign up for Groove Enterprise
Services (which seems unlikely for that few people) so that you could
automatically maintain backup copies of the Groove accounts, or did you, on
a separate "server" computer, create a Groove account to be a member of all
workspaces created by any of the three of you? Or something else entirely?

In general, Groove will take up more space when fewer members of a workspace
are available online, because it maintains a copy of all changes that have
been sent, but are not yet known to have been received by every endpoint
(member/computer) of a workspace.

If you provide me with more details on what you mean by "server" and what
are doing, I will try to figure out what is happening. (For reference, my
grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ folder is a little under 2 GB, but my largest
workspace is under 1 GB. I currently have 30 workspaces on this PC, but seven
of those are small test spaces.)

--
Frances Selkirk [MSFT]
Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers
no rights.

Hi,
we are a small business (3 people) who are using Groove. However, as we
started using a server as well, and signed up this server as an administrator
of the groove accounts (so that even if all users remove the Groove files
from their laptop, there is still a copy on the server), Groove quickly ate
up all the available memory on our server. As it is now, the folder
grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ is growing by about one GB per hour. This is the
case when there is only one user plus the server connected to the workspaces.
Why is this? Will the folder keep on groving indefinitely? How much space
are we supposed to have allocated to Groove (on each computer? on the
server?).
best regards,
Christina

 

[Michael]

I am running out of space on my hard drive on 1 of 2 computers running groove
2007. The one that is loosing space is on all the time. I went looking
folder by folder to find out where all the filespace was going and found
Groovebinaryfilestore.xss_ folder under
C:\Users\XXXXX\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\Groove\System.

This folder size is 97.4 GB. I have a 120 GB HD. I have been running
Groove pretty steadily at least since December 2007 and just noticed this
issue.

Do I have to delete all the files in this folder in order to free up the
space?
It is either that or stop using Groove all together.

Groove has been a little fussy anyhow using resources and locking up
frequently while using the resources even after trying to shut down. These
problems mostly occur when I startup Groove and it tries to sync with the
other computer. I often have to end its process to free up RAM when it
ceases to operate properly.

A couple of times I had to delete the account of a computer and then add it
back on to get the program to operate again.

Please Help,
Michael

Frances,
We hae a separate (virtual) server running Microsoft Small Business Server.
This computer has a mailadress on its own and its own Groove account which is
a member
of all (we only have one) groove workspaces (we are using a file sharing
workspace). It was the server/administrator account which created the Groove
workspace and at present we have three members (the server and two
employees). This file sharing folder and subfolder make up about 1.6 GB,
whilst the groovebinaryfilestore made up about 15 GB before the server
crashed (after just having run the workspace for a few days). We then started
from the beginning again, with only 2 users, the server plus one employee,
but it still clogs up quite a number of GB of memory.
Does it make a difference who creates the workspace (i.e. should I create it
on my computer and then invite the server instead of vice versa)?
Best regards,
Christina

I am confused about what you are doing. Did you sign up for Groove Enterprise
Services (which seems unlikely for that few people) so that you could
automatically maintain backup copies of the Groove accounts, or did you, on
a separate "server" computer, create a Groove account to be a member of all
workspaces created by any of the three of you? Or something else entirely?

In general, Groove will take up more space when fewer members of a workspace
are available online, because it maintains a copy of all changes that have
been sent, but are not yet known to have been received by every endpoint
(member/computer) of a workspace.

If you provide me with more details on what you mean by "server" and what
are doing, I will try to figure out what is happening. (For reference, my
grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ folder is a little under 2 GB, but my largest
workspace is under 1 GB. I currently have 30 workspaces on this PC, but seven
of those are small test spaces.)

--
Frances Selkirk [MSFT]
Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers
no rights.

Hi,
we are a small business (3 people) who are using Groove. However, as we
started using a server as well, and signed up this server as an administrator
of the groove accounts (so that even if all users remove the Groove files
from their laptop, there is still a copy on the server), Groove quickly ate
up all the available memory on our server. As it is now, the folder
grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ is growing by about one GB per hour. This is the
case when there is only one user plus the server connected to the workspaces.
Why is this? Will the folder keep on groving indefinitely? How much space
are we supposed to have allocated to Groove (on each computer? on the
server?).
best regards,
Christina

 

[Michael]

I deleted my account from one computer after saving my account to the
desktop. Then I deleted all files in the grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ folder.
Then I tried to add the saved account and had some issue downloading the
workspaces. Instead I had to delete all the workspaces from that computer
and then invite using the other account on the other computer and merge to
the folders or syncronize the folders from scratch. Seems to be working out
good but took some time (couple hours) to pull it off remotely.

gained 100 GB on my hard drive.

Frances,
We hae a separate (virtual) server running Microsoft Small Business Server.
This computer has a mailadress on its own and its own Groove account which is
a member
of all (we only have one) groove workspaces (we are using a file sharing
workspace). It was the server/administrator account which created the Groove
workspace and at present we have three members (the server and two
employees). This file sharing folder and subfolder make up about 1.6 GB,
whilst the groovebinaryfilestore made up about 15 GB before the server
crashed (after just having run the workspace for a few days). We then started
from the beginning again, with only 2 users, the server plus one employee,
but it still clogs up quite a number of GB of memory.
Does it make a difference who creates the workspace (i.e. should I create it
on my computer and then invite the server instead of vice versa)?
Best regards,
Christina

I am confused about what you are doing. Did you sign up for Groove Enterprise
Services (which seems unlikely for that few people) so that you could
automatically maintain backup copies of the Groove accounts, or did you, on
a separate "server" computer, create a Groove account to be a member of all
workspaces created by any of the three of you? Or something else entirely?

In general, Groove will take up more space when fewer members of a workspace
are available online, because it maintains a copy of all changes that have
been sent, but are not yet known to have been received by every endpoint
(member/computer) of a workspace.

If you provide me with more details on what you mean by "server" and what
are doing, I will try to figure out what is happening. (For reference, my
grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ folder is a little under 2 GB, but my largest
workspace is under 1 GB. I currently have 30 workspaces on this PC, but seven
of those are small test spaces.)

--
Frances Selkirk [MSFT]
Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers
no rights.

Hi,
we are a small business (3 people) who are using Groove. However, as we
started using a server as well, and signed up this server as an administrator
of the groove accounts (so that even if all users remove the Groove files
from their laptop, there is still a copy on the server), Groove quickly ate
up all the available memory on our server. As it is now, the folder
grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ is growing by about one GB per hour. This is the
case when there is only one user plus the server connected to the workspaces.
Why is this? Will the folder keep on groving indefinitely? How much space
are we supposed to have allocated to Groove (on each computer? on the
server?).
best regards,
Christina

 

[Frances Selkirk [MSFT]]

The grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ folder contains all the file data in all your
Groove Standard workspaces. Deleting it will corrupt those workspaces, as
records that point to those files will no longer be valid. It will not make
the workspaces smaller, and it will not entirely delete them. If you want to
delete all workspaces, you should do so from the UI or by using Grooveclean,
so that you delete all of each workspace, rather than just the file data from
it. Manually altering Groove system files can make Groove unusable.

For comparison, on my own computer, I opened Groove Workspace Manager and
added up the sizes given for my workspaces. The total was 1.94 GB. My
grovebinaryfilestore.xss_ folder is 1.89 GB, which is within the margin of
error introduced by rounding in Workspace Manager. I don't know what could
cause this folder to become so much larger. Deletions are processed in
batches, so if you keep adding and deleting the same files, that might be
part of it. Your workspace might also have a member or endpoint
(member/computer) that is not recieving changes. Actually, if you needed to
reinstall your account on this computer, then the former installation of your
account has become an unreachable endpoint. Unless you delete it (From
Options, Preferences, Account, Computers) Groove will not stop keeping
changes for it for some time.

Beyond that, I don't know what to suggest. If you open a support case, a
support engineer could gather more detailed information and disgnostic data.
You can do this online at
https://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?gprid=11630.

 

[Frances Selkirk [MSFT]]

That's even odder, as a File Sharing workspace should not use the
groovebinaryfilestore at all. That directory is for storing file data from
Standard workspace tools, such as the Groove Files tool or Pictures tool.

If you had just said that Groove, in general, was using increasingly more
memory, I would suspect version control or backup software. In a File Sharing
workspace, you can get into a situation like this:

1. A workspace member modifies a file in the workspace.
2. Groove detects the change and sends it to the other workspace member.
3. A backup or version control program detects the change, processes it, and
writes something to the file.
4. Groove detects the change and sends it to the other workspace member.
5. Steps 3 and 4 repeat indefinitely.

In this scenario, the Groove queues could grow faster than Groove can
process them.

I'm afraid I have no suggestions beyond opening a support case. A support
engineer can gather more detailed information and collect Groove diagnositc
data to help identify the cause of the problem. You can open a case online at
https://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?gprid=11630.

Regards,

 

[Michael]

Well what I did worked for me. I only had two choices from what I could tell.
Delete those files or uninstall and cease use of groove. I use groove daily
and deleting those files didn't cause me any issues. I have a lot of
revolving files moving from folder to folder and being changed often.

I might even suggest deleting the files without deleting the account. That
is what I will try next time. If anything is bad with that I will delete the
account and create a new one and invite from the other computer again.

Worst case scenario: I would think that a reinstallation of groove may have
to happen if what frances says is correct.

Like he says everytime something changes it is creating a file. It looks to
me that the file size is at times 6MB. I had so many workspace files that
were from months ago that it took up more memory that the files themselves
that are on my computer.

If you do delete these files I suggest syncing all computers then exiting
Groove on all computers before any files are changed. If you have time to
wait you may want to follow his suggestion by openinng a support case. In my
scenario my computer had only 4MB of space left on the hard drive before I
tried this.