I regularly go onsite with enterprise customers of Microsoft and do Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) health checks. Recently, I have been rewriting many of my VBScripts into PowerShell scripts to help make the health check easier. I will...

I recently signed a contract with MCP Magazine to publish articles. This is effectively a syndication of this blog. Check out my first article called, “How to Speak SAN-ish” at http://mcpmag.com/articles/2011/05/12/how-to-speak-san-ish.aspx

One of the major reasons why I haven’t been blogging much is because I have spent most of my “free” time working on the Microsoft TechNet Wiki writing what I call the “PerfGuide”. We have a lot of great content up there for Windows performance analysis...

To prevent a process from crashing due to a System.OutOfMemory condition, the .NET garbage collector (GC) automatically defragments virtual memory. It can only do this for Gen 0 and Gen 1 memory allocations. Any allocations at 64 KB or larger will go...

You have arrived here because you have identified a high amount (greater than 50%) of processor time (\Processor(*)\% Processor Time), a high amount (greater than 30%) of privileged time (kernel time) (\Processor(*)\% Privileged Time) and a high amount...

I attended TechEd 2010 this week and it was great! I met a lot of great people and had a great time. TechEd was *huge* this year. They originally expected about 6,000 attendees, but about 8,000 actually attended. To say the least it was very crowded and...

So, I’ve been playing with generating counters within PAL to compare ratios of SQL Server Full Scans to Index Searches performance counters. This is an effort to get PAL v2.0 updated and more accurate than PAL v1.x. It works out quite nicely! I feel like...

You have arrived at this point in the adventure because you have identified high processor usage on your Windows computer. If this is not correct, then return to the Start of the Adventure . Threads (the worker bees of a process) can execute in one of...

You have arrived here because you suspect a performance problem with your Microsoft Windows computer or server. As a kid, I loved the “Choose your own adventure” books where each choice changed the outcome of the story. Today, I lead a life where my choices...

I was recently on the PowerScripting Podcast where we talked about the PAL tool and the challenges with developing it in PowerShell v2.0 such as dealing with very large PowerShell scripts. While on the podcast some of listeners asked about analyzing IIS...

  Originally from Dayton, OH. Clint joined Microsoft in 1999 supporting web technologies, Microsoft load testing tools, and later worked as a Testing Consultant helping people with load testing at the Microsoft Services Labs. There he found a passion...

I haven’t had any performance analysis challenges lately, but there is a lot of confusion as to how to measure SAN performance. To many, a SAN is a proverbial “mysterious black box” that seems to perplex all who try to measure it’s performance with any...

This week I was in Denver, CO handling a high CPU performance issue with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2. The customer was seeing very high CPU utilization even when BizTalk doesn’t have any real work do to, so this was a bit of a mystery and a challenge...

While on "vacation" in Ohio last month, a good friend of mine called me up saying that Internet Explorer is crashing and unusable, so I asked him to bring his computer over for a look. The Problem/Symptoms First, I wanted to confirm what he...

Introduction It seems like every time I deliver the Vital Signs workshop (a Windows architecture course focused on performance analysis patterns) lately, we always have a great discussion about proper sizing of the page file. There is a lot of bad information...

Introduction Okay, I'm finally back from my 3 weeks of vacation. We went back to Dayton, Ohio to visit family and friends and had a great time. I wasn't onsite with any customers, but inevitably I had plenty of computer problems to solve. Some people...

I am teaching this week, so I figured I would talk about a case I had a few months ago. I have *plenty* of war stories to share, so I can certainly keep this weekly blog going for a long time. ;-) I’m a big fan of Mark Russinovich and David Solomon, so...

This week I was off to Phoenix, AZ again, but for a different customer this time. Phoenix is very hot this time of year – I think it got to about 110 degrees Fahrenheit hot enough to literally cook an egg on the sidewalk and likely burn it. ;-) When I...

About a month ago, I was conducting a BizTalk Health Check for a customer (yes, Microsoft BizTalk Server is one of my other specialties along with several others) where the BizTalk server has been running slower than expected. They noticed Out of Memory...

I did an IIS Health Check (IISHC) this week and found another 32-bit Windows 2003 web server that was out of System PTEs. This blog entry talks about how we resolved this issue. I detected this issue by looking at the boot.ini file which is one of the...

It was a dark and stormy night… actually it was sunny and clear, but just thought I’d start this blog series like a classic novel. :-) This is the first blog entry of my new blog related to my job. I made a mistake when creating my first one and ended...