Performance tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Pt 1

re: Performance tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Pt 1

Amit Rohela — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 05:48:19 GMT

I have a quick question regarding Page file settings.

We have windows server 2008 R2 with 64 GBs of RAM. the C: drive is of 100 GB. for better performance I am thinking of having 10 GB of page file on C Drive and rest on another drive D:

Is this a good combination or you think we can have the entire 64 GB on D: drive.

Will having the entire Pagefile on a D: drive affect performance.

Thanks in advance for your reply.

re: Performance tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Pt 1

Tim Newton - MSFT — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:14:36 GMT

Hi Sam,

A pausing issue could be driver related, but maybe not. The first place I would start would be to set up a Perfmon with all the Process, Processor and Physical Disk counters. You would want to set it up for an interval shorter than the length of the pauses. To prevent the file getting too big, you can set it to be a Binary Circular Log, which will allow you to set it to a size and it will not exceed that. Then, when the pause happens, you can stop the log and see what is going on. A pause will most likely show up as a gap in the Perfmon log. When this happens, zoom in and check what is happening directly before and directly after the gap. You will often see a process spiking up or down immediately before or after the gap. That indicates that the process is most likely involved with the pause. For a driver, I am sure we would have to use Process Monitor or XPerf to narrow it down. Good luck.

Tim Newton

re: Performance tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Pt 1

colin leversuch-roberts — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:30:40 GMT

what's your view on no page file? Generally pagefile usage is minimal on a sql server, I'd be concerned if I even managed greater than 1GB usage on C: - which means using multiple files would just leave unused files on the server , or does windows use page files simultaneously ( as against sequentially ? )

re: Performance tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Pt 1

Sam — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 06:47:56 GMT

Great article. If I may share a performance issue I can't detect it root cause -

I have a freeze of a seconds randomly. Now, I suspect it is a driver, but I can't afford to run XPERF

for a few hours since it creates a huge file. In order to catch the faulty driver, is there a way to trace who is the driver spiking DPC?

re: Performance tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Pt 1

Steve — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:06:36 GMT

How about some solid details and investigation procedures instead of this broad best practice nonsense we've had since '95.