There’s a Windows Server (2012 R2 to be specific) at a client’s location that I occasionally have to login to via RDP. The last couple of months the UI performance was painfully slow. Because I usually just needed to get in, check something quickly, and get out – I hadn’t spent any time tracking down what was going on. (It was still performing its “server duties” adequately so this wasn’t a huge priority.)
The other day, I decided I would spend a few minutes tracking it down. It turned out that there were 51 jobs in a print queue for a printer that was no longer physically on the network, but the printer share was still available on the server.
As soon as I deleted these print jobs (and the printer share), the UI performance was dramatically better. Obviously the shared printer shouldn’t have been left there and I know that the print jobs were taking up RAM, but I was surprised at how drastic the effect on performance was.