Clint Huffman's Windows Troubleshooting in the Field Blog

Clint Huffman is a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE) who has been with Microsoft for over 10 years. This blog documents the challenges he faces week to week in hopes that these experiences will help others.

Available for pre-order: Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide

Yay! After over a year in development, my book, the “Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide”, is...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 07/10/2014

How to create a “black box” performance counter data collector

I highly encourage my customers to run a “black box” performance counter data collector set on their...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 05/23/2014

Using Autoruns to validate system drivers

Recently, one of my enterprise customers had a system crash popularly known as a “blue screen...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 11/21/2013

Convert a performance counter data collector template into a PAL threshold file

If you want to have all of the counters in a counter log be represented in a PAL report, then use...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 11/18/2013

Tracking page file reads and writes

  The only real way of knowing if a page file is actually being “read from” is to get a file IO...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 10/16/2013

Full debugging of VBScripts using Visual Studio 2005

Want to do full debugging of a VBScripts, then use this procedure. One of the hardest parts about...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 09/30/2013

My personal reminder of common debugging commands

I don’t get as many opportunities to debug as I would like, but when I do, I always forget the...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 08/15/2013

Detecting ephemeral port exhaustion

Symptoms When Windows or Windows Server is out of ephemeral/outbound/dynamic network ports, it will...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 08/09/2013

Physical memory overwhelmed PAL analysis - holy grail found!

I just wrote a very complicated PAL analysis that determines if physical memory is overwhelmed. This...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 06/11/2013

Should the paging file be moved from C: drive?

Should the paging file be moved from C: drive to another drive? This was the question I received...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 06/07/2013

PAL processing, processors, and threads

I commonly get questioned on what response should be given to the NumberOfProcessors question...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 01/14/2013

PAL collector script – PalCollector.ps1

One of the top questions I get with the PAL tool is what data to collect. As many of you know, the...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 01/08/2013

How to create a threshold file for the PAL tool

The Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool is an open source project at https://pal.codeplex.com...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 01/08/2013

Page Frame Number (PFN) database

I just finished writing an article on the public, wiki, PFE PerfGuide on the subject of the Page...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 01/06/2013

Memory combining in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

I’ve spent that last few weeks studying the memory architecture of Windows 8 and Windows Server...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 11/29/2012

Can a process be limited on how much physical memory it uses?

I've been asked a lot of great questions lately and thought I'd post some of them. As you might...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 10/11/2012

My IIS7 PowerShell Scripts

I regularly go onsite with enterprise customers of Microsoft and do Microsoft Internet Information...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 12/04/2011

How to Speak SAN-ish

I recently signed a contract with MCP Magazine to publish articles. This is effectively a...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 05/13/2011

The Microsoft TechNet Wiki Performance Guide (PerfGuide)

One of the major reasons why I haven’t been blogging much is because I have spent most of my “free”...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 03/28/2011

The PAL Tool on Memory Leaks

To prevent a process from crashing due to a System.OutOfMemory condition, the .NET garbage collector...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 03/28/2011

My Incredible Week at TechEd 2010

I attended TechEd 2010 this week and it was great! I met a lot of great people and had a great time....

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 06/11/2010

PAL v2.0’s New Counter Generation Feature is Powerful

So, I’ve been playing with generating counters within PAL to compare ratios of SQL Server Full Scans...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 03/02/2010

Choose Your Own Adventure: User Mode Versus Privileged Mode Processor Usage

You have arrived at this point in the adventure because you have identified high processor usage on...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 02/20/2010

Choose Your Own Adventure: Start Here

You have arrived here because you suspect a performance problem with your Microsoft Windows computer...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 02/20/2010

W3C IIS Log Analysis using Log Parser

I was recently on the PowerScripting Podcast where we talked about the PAL tool and the challenges...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 01/07/2010

About the Author – Clint Huffman

  Originally from Dayton, OH. Clint joined Microsoft in 1999 supporting web technologies,...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 12/03/2009

The Case of the Mysterious Black Box

I haven’t had any performance analysis challenges lately, but there is a lot of confusion as to how...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 11/18/2009

The Case of the Add-on Crashers

While on "vacation" in Ohio last month, a good friend of mine called me up saying that...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 09/04/2009

Introduction Okay, I'm finally back from my 3 weeks of vacation. We went back to Dayton, Ohio to...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 08/23/2009

The Case of the Phantom Hard Page Faults

I am teaching this week, so I figured I would talk about a case I had a few months ago. I have...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 07/16/2009

The Case of the High CPU Web Server

This week I was off to Phoenix, AZ again, but for a different customer this time. Phoenix is very...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 07/09/2009

The Case of the Out of Memory BizTalk Server

About a month ago, I was conducting a BizTalk Health Check for a customer (yes, Microsoft BizTalk...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 07/07/2009

Another Case of the Missing PTEs

I did an IIS Health Check (IISHC) this week and found another 32-bit Windows 2003 web server that...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 06/18/2009

The Case of the Missing PTEs

It was a dark and stormy night… actually it was sunny and clear, but just thought I’d start this...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 06/16/2009

Starting my blog off again

I'm re-starting off my Windows Performance blog here. I originally wanted my full name of...

Author: Clint Huffman Date: 05/12/2009