December 2005 - Posts

posted Tuesday, December 20, 2005 6:36 AM by robertvv :: 0 Comments

Calculating single disk performance for random I/O

I have been doing a lot of performance analysis lately. Nine out of ten times the bad performance is caused by a not optimized storage solution. Why? When data doesn't fit into the memory of a server, it has to come from disk sooner or later. In my experience Read More

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posted Monday, December 19, 2005 9:32 PM by robertvv :: 0 Comments

To be or not to be... Anti Virus solutions on a server

Not to be... (at least not always) Why? Simple, try to image, you are a real time mail server, doing 5000 I/O's per second and you're interrupted everytime by Anti Virus (AV) software when you try to write, or even worse try to read to and from a storage Read More
posted Monday, December 19, 2005 8:43 PM by robertvv :: 0 Comments

The sense and nonsense of scalability by adding CPU's

I'm often faced with the following customer situation: "I added additional CPU's to the system because the average CPU utilization exceeded 80%, but the application doesn't run any smoother. Why is that?". Well, let me try to explain. To determine a Read More

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posted Thursday, December 15, 2005 8:09 AM by robertvv :: 0 Comments

Microsoft Cluster Service configuration backup/restore utility

Several weeks ago I wrote a small utility, based on MSDN sample code, to backup and restore Microsoft Cluster Service configuration database information. I experienced some problems with restoring information, so I wanted to be sure a backup existed that Read More

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posted Thursday, December 15, 2005 6:31 AM by robertvv :: 0 Comments

Windows Server Performance considerations - introduction

The last months I am more and more engaged in accounts who often experience serious performance issues. By the time I am called on to the scene, they status of the account is usually at a critical level. After I have done my research, I often write a Read More

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posted Wednesday, December 14, 2005 10:36 PM by robertvv :: 0 Comments

Reading SQL Server logs using stored procedures

While I was searching for a way to determine the backup status of SQL databases, I came across the following Stored Procedure: "sp_readerrorlog". However, it's not documented in the SQL Servers books online. After some googling, I decided to use Read More

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