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Hello again AskPerf!  Blake Morrison here to introduce you to a new tool from Sysinternals called ProcDump.  If you are familiar with AdPlus then ProcDump will be a welcome addition to your debugging arsenal.  ProcDump is a new command line tool which allows you to monitor a running process...

I know – it really does seem like I’m on a bit of a Sesame Street kick at the moment, doesn’t it? Ah well - it is Friday and the weekend is almost upon us. Why not have a little fun? Today, we’re continuing on with looking at different debugger commands. Our topic for today is the lm command and its...

Good morning AskPerf! 2009 is moving fast – it’s hard to believe we’re already into August! Today, we’re continuing on with our debugging focus. Over the next few posts, we’ll be looking at different command types within the debugger. Today’s post is brought to you by the letter … k. I know, I couldn...

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. ...

Hello AskPerf – my name is Digvijay Nath, and I’m a Support Engineer on the Performance team in our Bangalore office.  Today, I’m going to quickly cover the .MSP file used by the Windows Installer.  The installer uses different file types to glean data about software installs, uninstalls and...

Happy Friday AskPerf.  My name is Syed Yusuf, and I am a Support Engineer on the Performance team.  Application crash issues can be somewhat tricky to resolve – especially if we’re dealing with a third party application.  Today we’re going to take a look a the Application Verifier tool...

Hello again AskPerf! Blake Morrison here to discuss a little known OS tool called TYPEPERF. TYPEPERF is a built-in tool that writes performance data to the command window or to a log file. If you are a command line junkie, love to script, and need to get Performance data from your Workstation or Server...

Happy Friday AskPerf! Today’s post is a quick overview of the new MPS Reports tool that was released last week. For those of you that have worked on support incidents with us in the past, you’re used to downloading multiple flavors of the MPS Reports based on the issue that you were experiencing. With...

Today’s post comes to us from Priyanka Rotti and Sudha N – two of our Support Engineers on the Performance team. Reviewing Performance Monitor Logs can be one of the most daunting tasks for an administrator, especially if it’s not something that you do on a regular basis. The Performance Analysis of...

Hello AskPerf!  It’s Blake Morrison here once more with some information on a Windows feature with which you may not be familiar … But, before we start off this post think about the following scenarios – how many of them have you experienced? Your Server's total combined CPU utilization exceeds...

Hello AskPerf! My name is Jeffrey Worline and I am a Support Escalation Engineer on the Performance team in Texas. We’ve done a number of posts in the past about WMI, and different WMI tools, and today we’re going to take a look at a powerful tool that you can use. If you would like a little help with...

Hello AskPerf!  My name is Satyajit and I am a Support Engineer on the Performance team.  Today we’re going to discuss the use of a very useful Windows SysInternals tools named Autoruns that we can use to examine programs that start during the boot process or the login process.  This comes...

Back in “the old days”, you could use a ball-point pen to break into the debugger .  No, I haven’t stayed too long at the fair – you could use the tip of the ball-point pen to short the nearest pair of pins to create a hardware crash dump.  Obviously this isn’t recommended (or supported!),...

Hello AskPerf. Happy New Year! My name is Gangadharan Prashanth and we’re going to kick off 2009 with a quick look at WMI Namespace Security and a common error message that we see when running the WMI Diagnosis Utility (WMIDiag). When running WMIDiag, we often see an alert that looks something like this...

Here’s an odd issue that one of our Support Engineers ran into with a customer recently that I thought would be interesting to share. Systems Administrators use scheduled tasks to run batch files as a normal part of their job. In this specific instance, our customer was using the PsService and PsTools...

There are times when tools such as DebugDiag, ADPlus or UserDump fail to capture a dump when a process terminates unexpectedly.  When that happens, we can launch the process inside the debugger to ensure that we capture a dump.  Here’s how we do it: Install the Debugging Tools for Windows Copy...

Hello AskPerf readers!  My name is Leena Nair, and I am a Support Engineer on the Performance team.  Over the last couple of months, I’ve had some very interesting discussions with customers regarding anti-virus software selection, and I thought it might be interesting to share some pieces...

Every so often, a customer needs to enable logging on their print queues to capture as much information about print activities on their server.  Configuring the logging options is actually quite an easy administrative task, but there are a couple of different ways to configure the options – through...

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...

Hello AskPerf readers!  My name is Austin and I am a Technical Lead on the Performance team.  In several of our posts, we’ve discussed troubleshooting server performance issues, especially on file servers.  Most of you have probably already read our post on Network .PST files , or Windows...

Hello there! My name is Mike and I am an Escalation Engineer with the Platforms team. I’ve been reading the AskPerf blog for a while and wanted to share some information about a very useful troubleshooting tool. A quick word of warning though – to really get the most out of this tool, you need to be...

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...

The Server Message Protocol (SMB) is the file sharing protocol used by default on Windows-based computers. Although file sharing and network protocols are primarily supported by our Networking team, it is important to understand how SMB works given its importance to network activities. SMB 2.0 was introduced...

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.  Finding out this information is not as...

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...