Robert Smith (Platforms Field Engineer) has recently posted a new blog that cover one important area of Windows performance that few people understand well. In his blog post he talks about how to use Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) in general and the XPerf tool in particular. Xperf.exe is the command line tool used to start, stop, and manage traces.  He then goes on to outline how to use the toolkit to look into Storage and know where to start looking when you hit a performance issue.

Here's the outline of his post:

  • Introduction
    • Obtaining the WPT Tools
    • More About the WPT
  • Getting Started: Capturing Storage Performance Data
    • Scenarios
    • Considerations for Starting a Trace
    • Stopping a Trace
  • Trace Analysis
    • How to perform Trace Analysis
    • What to Look For
  • What are We Doing Here?
    • High Disk Service Times
    • Storport Tracing (For Storport storage devices)
    • High IO Times
  • Conclusion

If you're interested in Performance (and specially Storage Performance) and you never used the WPT or XPerf.exe before, this is a must read.

Full post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/robertsmith/archive/2012/02/07/analyzing-storage-performance-using-the-windows-performance-toolkit.aspx