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One of our Escalation Engineers has posted the following blog on the NTDEBUGGING page: Performance Monitor Averages, the Right Way and the Wrong Way Recently we have found that under some conditions perfmon will use the incorrect algorithm to calculate averages.  When reading from log files perfmon...

Hello AskPerf readers.  We wanted to alert you to an issue that is generating calls within support here recently.  The October 2012 release of the HP HpCISSs2.sys driver is causing Windows Server 2012 to hang or become unresponsive every 3 –7 days. Check out the blog below that details more...

Good morning AskPerf!  How many times have we looked at Windows Task Manager and wondered what the values on the Performance tab meant?  Why do they not add up?  What is the difference between Free and Available Memory, etc., etc., etc.?  In today’s post, we will take a look at these...

Happy Friday AskPerf! One of our Technical Account Managers pinged me a few weeks ago and asked if I could put together something on how to do a server baseline. After thinking about how best to do this for a while, I realized that trying to create a one-stop shop for server performance baselines goes...

Welcome back AskPerf!  Carrying on with our debugging / architectural theme from the last couple of weeks, today’s topic is about the stack.  A stack is a way of storing information – a data structure.  When a new object is placed on the stack it is placed on the top of the stack. ...

On June 18th, Mark Russinovich will be hosting a Virtual Roundtable on Windows 7 Application Compatibility. This is a chance for IT Pros to learn all about Windows 7 Application Compatibility and get answers to any management or deployment questions for Windows 7. You can submit your performance questions...

MEMORY MANAGEMENT - WORKING SET TRIMMING Description: Working Set Trimming refers to a condition wherein all Working Sets are flushed to the disk. A Working Set is the amount of physical memory used by a process. Working Set Trimming is primarily seen on SQL Server systems when large amounts...

MEMORY MANAGEMENT (GENERAL: WINDOWS VISTA AND LATER) Description: Memory management is the term used to describe how Windows handles the manipulation and allocation of both virtual and physical memory resources. Physical memory is considered the total of physical RAM and the pagefile or pagefiles...

MEMORY MANAGEMENT – EVENT ID 333 Description: The first thing to understand is what exactly an Event ID 333 is. The event ID 333 is a System event error log that occurs when the registry is unable to complete a flush operation to the disk. There are several reasons that this can fail and we'll...

It occurred to me that with so many technical blogs out there, that it might be useful to bring you some posts from our fellow bloggers here at Microsoft that have been published recently … If you haven’t been keeping up with our colleagues over at the Terminal Services blog, then you may have missed...

On September 24th, Mark Russinovich will be hosting a Virtual Roundtable on Windows Vista Performance. Mark and a panel of industry experts will be discussing several issues related to Windows Vista including: Overall OS Performance Common Misconfigurations Boot times Applets Disk Performance...

File system filter drivers are often the topic of some interesting discussions when working on server performance issues.  Understanding how a file system filter driver works is the topic of today’s post.  We’ll also quickly discuss one of the most common issues that we see  - especially...

Hi there, this is Mark with the Windows Performance Team. This post is a quick introduction to a new performance tracing tool called XPerf. Moving forward with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, this powerful tool will hopefully be utilized more often. XPerf is part of the Windows Performance Toolkit...

Following on from our last Two Minute Drill, today's topic is the RELOG.EXE utility.  RELOG.EXE creates new performance logs from data in existing performance logs by changing the sampling rate and / or converting the file format.  RELOG.EXE is not a new tool - it is however one of those tools...

Something many of our readers have asked for is a quick overview of new and useful tools and features in Windows. Today we are launching a new series, called our “Two Minute Drill” – these will be brief posts that provide a high-level view of tools and features. We have already published several posts...

Looking at the title, I know you’re thinking, “what do these four things have to do with one another?” The answer: not a great deal in fact. However, there are some very interesting posts and articles on these subjects that have been published recently that we thought we would bring to your attention...

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 I/O Handling.  So let's dive right in ... The...

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 as well as specific posts that are relevant...

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 is that although you want to have enough RAM to...

Troubleshooting High CPU utilization can be addressed from a couple of different standpoints.  In the first instance, you might have a single process consuming CPU - essentially a runaway process.  However, what happens if there is no runaway process, and yet the CPU utilization still continues...

In previous posts we've discussed the basics of memory management including an overview of kernel and user memory , pool resources as well as the /3GB switch .   Continuing our discussion of memory management, we are going to examine an issue that we have been seeing more of on the Performance...

On Tuesday, we talked about Heap - what it is and how it works. Today we're going to continue our look at Heap. At the end of the last post we mentioned Look-Aside Lists and Low Fragmentation Heap. But before we dive into those, let's take a look at Heap Synchronization. The heap manager supports concurrent...

From time to time, customers will call in to report "performance problems" that they are having when copying large files from one location to another.  By "performance problems", they mean that the file isn't copying as fast as they expect.  The most common scenario is copying...

Today we're starting a new series of posts focused on understanding the Windows System Architecture itself. In our first post, we're going to quickly review some basic Windows concepts and terms including a brief overview of the Windows API, Services and the difference between a Process and a Thread...

Following up on our Memory Management 101 post, we're moving on to a discussion of Pool Resources and Pool Resource Depletion. First of all - what are Pool Resources? When a machine boots up, the Memory Manager creates two dynamically sized memory pools that kernel-mode components use to allocate system...