Performance | Server Ninjas

Perfmon Spreadsheet

Sep 252009

Jimmy May has a great post over on his website that goes along with my last post about performance counters. Jimmy works allot with SQL performance but also included some of the Vital Signs information is his spreadsheet. Below is the link for the post which as that spreadsheet attached to it. I would get over and download and keep it tucked away on your desktop so you can look like a genius.

Jimmy May’s Performance Post – Spreadsheet Attached In Post
http://blogs.msdn.com/jimmymay/archive/2008/10/15/perfmon-objects-counters-thresholds-utilities-for-sql-server.aspx

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Know Your Servers Pulse

Learning, performance No Responses »

Sep 232009

One of the big things we struggle with as an administrator is keeping a pulse on what our servers are doing. Perfmon can be pretty overwhelming if you don’t know what you need to concentrate on. Microsoft has designed a class to help you called Vital Signs. This class is currently only for customers with Premier service contracts. So if you are not one of those customers you will have to wait. If you do happen to have the opportunity to take the class I recommend it. In the meantime there has been a great article that has been put out on TechNet that gives you an overview of what you should be watching. Not only does this article tell you what to watch but it also gives you an idea of what the thresholds should be. It also goes into detail on when you should measure it and also how to tweak Perfmon so your graphs are readable in XP\Server 2003. Stop over and check the article out and let me know what you think.

TechNet Article – Taking Your Server’s Pulse
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.08.pulse.aspx?pr=blog

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How Do You Size Your Page File

Learning, performance No Responses »

Sep 082009

This is one of the hardest questions that faces server administrators. How big do you actually size your page file if you don’t just follow the 1.5 rule. Clint Huffman has a great post over on his blog on how you figure out what your page file should be. I can by no means cover it as well as he does so I encourage you to stop by the link below and read his post on how you should set your page file. He also includes a link from technet on how to troubleshoot memory issues. The link is a presentation that David Solomon did. The webcast is about 90 minutes long but I promise it will take you a lot longer to get through it. Either that or you will have to watch it multiple times to catch all the facts that are in the webcast. Going through this webcast pushed me over the edge to buy the latest Windows Internals book. It is focused on Windows Server 2008 and Vista, but there is allot of general knowledge that can be applied to all Microsoft operating systems.

Clint’s Post On Page File
http://blogs.technet.com/clinth/archive/2009/09/03/the-case-of-the-enormous-page-file.aspx

David Solomon’s Webcast
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/sessionh.aspx?videoid=64&PUID=0003BFFD88341992

Windows Internals 5 On Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Windows%C2%AE-Internals-Including-Windows-PRO-Developer/dp/0735625301

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