Performance Newsgroup

  • Thread starter Thread starter Roberto Ruiz
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Roberto Ruiz

Hi all,
I'm trying to start digging seriously into performance issues, something
that I believe is really a complex and quite unexplored arena and I came to
the newsgroups looking for something like a performance newsgroup, but I've
found there's nothing like this here. I'd appreciate any suggestions on
resources about this subject (Newsgroups, Websites, etc)

Thanx in advance,
Robert

Roberto Ruiz
Brainbench MVP for Windows 2000 Desktop Admin
http://www.brainbench.com
 
You might Google for W2k "performance tweaks" and similar search args.
You're right, it's a complex arena - but it is by no means unexplored.
The gaming community, and to some extent the server community, who try
for every ounce of horsepower, have batteries of tricks. As always, you
travel these roads at your own risk. It's often the case that optimal
performance, predictability, and stability intersect at different points
for different purposes.

Vanilla W2k benefits from years of experience with fairly complex
algorithms across the spectrum of many manufacturers' and universities'
research and design teams, but in a given case a registry tweak or two
may improve certain characteristics. Mostly, it's math; down and dirty
queueing theory, statistics, etc.
 
Hi again,
Maybe I didn´t make my point clear enough. It's true that some tricks may do
the job sometimes when trying to tweak performance, but I was actually
talking about studying performance in the most orthodox way, that is: using
Performance logs and counters to monitor the performance of a machine and
extracting some useful information from those endless graphics and numbers.
For example:
- A computer is extremely irresponsive and when I take a look at the task
manager I see that the processor is practically idle, there is plenty of
free memory so there can´t or shouldn´t be any important paging activity so
I say what the hell is going on? Maybe there is a lot of disk reading, maybe
it's browsing the network looking for I don´t know what ....
The numbers given by the performance monitor are dificult to interpret and
seem contradictory at times, even when you know something about computer
hardware and OS architecture ..... that´s the kind of information I´m
looking for ....
Thanx anyway,
Robert
 
Roberto - indeed I didn't understand. I thought you were embarking on
some scholarly pursuit.

Is there a specific "irresponsiveness" problem you are trying to
diagnose? There may be a simple solution, if such a problem exists and
you describe it clearly. Gradual hard drive failure, for example, can
lock up a system for increasingly long times (eventually even hours) in
certain circumstances.

I'm unable to help with data reduction/analysis for various performance
monitor output streams.
 
Addendum: in my post of a minute ago, I should have added that such
prolonged system lockups may leave no log messages or other
"footprints"; they are hardware-induced, invisible to W2k...
 
Dan, thanx for you answer. Actually I'm trying to start studying the
subject, I've been about doing it for some time, but now I have a specific
problem: I wanted to redirect and centralize the My Documents and Desktop
folders for all users and bought two new computers equiped with IDE RAID
Controllers (Promise Fastrak SX4000) to act as file servers, in an attempt
to attain a quite high capacity and performance without embarking in an
expensive SCSI RAID solution, I mounted them with 4 hard drives in a RAID 5
configuration and the result is that the servers are performing quite slow
and I have no point of comparison because the whole thing is new (the
hardware and the distribution of information). As a matter of fact, users
(who actually don't know where the documents are) have not complained of
poor performance, but personally I don't feel it good enough, furthemore,
when I log on locally on the servers the responsiveness is miserable. I
think that this could be because the server is "concentrated" in her file
server work. The point is that I'd like to find the way to know if this
behavior is normal according to the load that the server is handling, if the
memory is being taken advantage of, if the RAIDs have actually improved the
disk subsystem's performance, if it would be better to implement another
RAID configuration or if the Fastrak SX4000 sucks and I better implement a
software RAID or something else.
I have read the Windows documentation on this performance subjects and it's
not quite clear, the figures of memory utilization in Task Manager seem
extrange to me and the counters I have measured in Perfomance Monitor
frecuently seem contradictory and they don´t tell me anything about simple
performance facts of the hardware like pure read and write speeds.
This is a comment anyway, I'm just looking for more information and some
environment to share and discuss my tests and observations.
Thanx,
Robert
 
Roberto, I'm way outside my box here and maybe some other wiser
newsgroupie will pitch in. I do know that there are inexpensive products
that will exercise individual HDDs and report access time measurements
in simple formats; one I've used over time is from www.grc.com. I should
think that there are similar utilities for RAIDx configs, but don't know
- don't use RAID myself. I'll bow out now - good luck :-)
 
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