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BAD_POOL_CALLER? What the …
29 August 08 06:00 AM

From time to time, a customer support incident for a bugcheck will make its way over to us on the Performance team.  Those of you that have worked with support engineers on the Performance team already know that we generally don’t work with bugcheck Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 0 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

The Basics of Page Faults
10 June 08 06:00 AM

In our last post, we talked about Pages and Page Tables.  Today, we’re going to take a look at one of the most common problems when dealing with virtual memory – the Page Fault.  A page fault occurs when a program requests an address on a page Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 2 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Two Minute Drill: Find /3GB without using boot.ini
27 May 08 06:00 AM

We've talked a lot about the /3GB switch and its effect on system resources in previous posts.  Today we are going to discuss how to determine whether or not /3GB is enabled on a 32-bit system without looking at the boot.ini file or using MSCONFIG.EXE.  Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 5 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting, two minute drill

Troubleshooting Server Hangs – Part Four
16 May 08 06:00 AM

Welcome to Part Four of our Server Hang troubleshooting series. Today we are going to discuss PTE depletion and Low Physical Memory conditions and how those two issues can lead to server hangs. In our post on the /3GB switch we mentioned that in general, Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Troubleshooting Server Hangs – Part Three
09 May 08 06:00 AM

In our last post on Server Hangs, we discussed using the Debugging Tools to examine a dump file to analyze pool depletion.  Today we are going to look at using our troubleshooting tools to examine a server hang caused by a handle leak.  Issues Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 2 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Troubleshooting Server Hangs – Part Two
06 May 08 06:00 AM

Several months ago, we wrote a post on Troubleshooting Server Hangs .  At the end of that post, we provided some basic steps to follow with respect to server hangs.  The last step in the list was following the steps in KB Article 244139 to prepare Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 2 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Using Special Pool to find out who is allocating a Pool Tag
15 April 08 06:00 AM

OK, a quick disclaimer right at the start.  The steps we discuss in this post assume that you are very comfortable with kernel debugging, and in particular live debugging.  This is a bit of a niche post, but it is a question that we get every Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 1 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

An Introduction to Pool Tags
11 April 08 06:00 AM

We’ve discussed several areas of Memory Management in our blog since we started. Today, we’re going to take a look at Pool Tags and how they can be used to identify the source of Pool Memory leaks. A pool tag is a four-byte character that is associated Read More...

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Filed under: architecture, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Lock Pages in Memory ... do you really need it?
25 March 08 06:00 AM

Back In October, we wrote a post regarding the Event ID 333 Errors and how to troubleshoot them .  At the end of that post, we mentioned the "Lock Pages in Memory" user right.  One of the things we mentioned was that if you have an Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, memory management, performance, troubleshooting, windows server 2008

WS2008: Memory Management, Dynamic Kernel Addressing, Memory Priorities and I/O Handling
07 February 08 06:00 AM

It's the end of the first week - seven days down and only  twenty more to go.  Today we will take a very brief look at some important enhancements to Memory Management, as well as talk about Dynamic Kernel Address Space, Memory Priorities and Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 1 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, memory management, performance, troubleshooting, windows server 2008

WS2008: Dynamic Link Library Loader and Address Space Load Randomization
06 February 08 06:00 AM

There's only three weeks to go till Launch Day.  Today, we're going to talk about the Dynamic Link Library (DLL) Loader and Address Space Load Randomization.  In Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, when talking about process and thread creation, Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 8 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, memory management, performance, security, troubleshooting, vista, windows server 2008

WS2008: Upgrade Paths, Resource Limits & Registry Values
01 February 08 06:00 AM

It's February 1, 2008. Only twenty-six more days until Windows Server 2008 is released to the world. With that in mind, we have twenty-six posts lined up between now and February 27 covering areas of Windows Server 2008 that contain both general information Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 10 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, memory management, performance, troubleshooting, windows server 2008

An Overview of Troubleshooting Memory Issues - Part Two
29 January 08 06:11 AM

In our last post, we looked at some common memory issues and how to troubleshoot them.  Today we're going to go over excessive paging and memory bottlenecks. We've talked about issues with the page file in several posts - something to bear in mind Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

An Overview of Troubleshooting Memory Issues
25 January 08 06:00 AM

We've talked quite a bit in the past about various memory management concepts - the use of the /3GB switch , Understanding Pool Resources , the x86 Virtual Address Space and so on.  The most common manifestation of memory issues is a memory shortage Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Understanding Crash Dump Files
08 January 08 06:00 AM

At the end of 2007 we talked about Bugchecks and why they happen .  Today we're going to talk about the Crash Dump files themselves - the different types of dumps, how the dumps themselves are generated and why you will need a correctly sized page Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting