Windows 2000 Performance Guide

Tools of the Trade

Understanding the tools of the performance analyst’s trade is essential for approaching matters of Windows 2000 performance. Rather than focus merely on tools and how they work, we chose to emphasize the use of analytic techniques to diagnose and solve performance problems. We stress an empirical approach, making observations of real systems under stress. If you are a newcomer to the Microsoft operating system but understand how Unix, Linux, Solaris, OpenVMS, MVS, or another full-featured OS works, you will find much that is familiar here. Moreover, despite breathtaking changes in computer architecture, many of the methods and techniques used to solve earlier performance problems can still be applied successfully today. This is a comforting thought as we survey the complex computing environments, a jumbled mass of hardware and software alternatives, that we are called upon to assess, configure, and manage today. Measurement methodology, workload characterization, benchmarking, decomposition techniques, and analytic queuing models remain as effective today as they were for the pioneering individuals who first applied these methods to problems in computer performance analysis.

Computer performance evaluation is significant because it is very closely associated with the productivity of the human users of computerized systems. Efficiency is the principal rationale for computer-based automation. Whenever productivity is a central factor in decisions regarding the ...