Hi folks, it has been a while as we continue to be heads down on the performance for Windows Server 8 ! But recently some of the new features and enhancements for Windows Server 8 have been introduced in Bill Laing’s, Corporate Vice President of...

Under load, the default buffer size used the by the virtual switch may provide inadequate buffer and result in packet loss. We recommend increasing the VM bus receive buffer from 1Mb to 2Mb. Traffic jams happen every day, all across the world. Too...

For those of you running Hyper-V on NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture) based platforms (such as HP’s DL785), this blog presents a tuning suggestion for how to fine tune the placement of virtual machine (VM) on to a specific NUMA node. Every...

What is “FSCT”? New builds of Microsoft Windows are produced almost every day for internal development and testing. In order to detect performance regressions as soon as possible, those builds have to be evaluated and compared to their predecessors...

Loyal readers - many of the performance questions we get in the Windows Server Performance team pertain to networking. We've described several networking performance features and applicable scenarios in previous posts and in our tuning guides . We...

CPU hardware and features are rapidly evolving, and your performance testing and analysis methodologies may need to evolve as well. If you rely on CPU utilization as a crucial performance metric, you could be making some big mistakes interpreting the...

With Windows Server 2008 R2 almost at RTM, a new tuning guide has been released. It can be found here . And don't forget the Windows Server 2008 Turning Guide is still availiable and has recently been refreshed for SP2. Windows Server Performance...

Matthew Robben here, I’m a Program Manager on the Windows Server Performance team and my primary responsibility is Windows Server power management. Server power efficiency is a topic of considerable importance – in today’s difficult economy, IT organizations...

In the past few weeks, there have been a number of new feature announcements around Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 at PDC and WinHEC conferences. From a Server perspective, Power Management, Virtualization, and Greater than 64 processor support...

My name is Tim Litton, I work as a Program Manager within the Microsoft Windows Server team, and my particular area of focus is performance optimization for Hyper-V. With the recent release of Hyper-V, customers are starting to ask us how to configure...

On Windows Server 2008 and later, applications can programmatically get information about how the underlying hardware components relate to one another. Examples include spatial locality and memory latency. This article describes how developers can get...

Tom Hawthorn, Karthik Mahesh - Windows Server Performance Team A significant percentage of web sites utilize PHP as a platform for dynamic content. During the development of Windows 2008, Microsoft included improvements that enable PHP to run more...

Rick Vicik - Architect, Windows Server Performance Team The third, and final, part of this series covers I/O Completions and Memory Management techniques. I will go through the different ways to handle I/O completions with some recommendations and...

The guide has been updated with sections on Power and Hyper-V guidelines and best practices. Check out the updated Tuning Guide and tell us what you think by following the feedback link at the top of the Tuning Guide. We look forward to hearing from you...

Rick Vicik - Architect, Windows Server Performance Team The second part of this series covers Data Structures and Locks. I will provide general guidance on which data structures to use under certain circumstances and how to use locks without having...

NTttcp (Windows port of Berkley's TTCP winsock based test tool) has officially gone live ( http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/network/TCP_tool.mspx ) on Microsoft.com. NTttcp is a useful tool to help measure overall Windows networking performance with...

Rick Vicik - Architect, Windows Server Performance Team Now that processors won’t be getting dramatically faster each year, application developers must learn how to design their applications for scalability and efficiency on multiple processor systems...

Networking performance has increasingly become one of the most important factors in overall system performance. Many of the factors that affect networking performance fall under the following three categories: Network adapter hardware and driver performance...

Hi all, I thought I’d forward around a link to the WS08 performance presentation we did for the Server 2008 launch. We cover a number of the areas/roles of the product and provide comparisons against Server 2003 – have a look at the attached XPS document...

Thanks for visiting our blog! I’m a development lead in the Windows Server Performance team and I led the performance effort on Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 over the past three and a half years. We’ve worked with the product team throughout the...

Welcome to the Microsoft Windows Server Performance team blog! As the Group Program Manager for the team, I’m delighted to introduce the team and provide the first post to kick off the blog. The Windows Server Performance team is a part of the Core...