Windows 2000 Performance Guide

Performance Tools

We should consider ourselves lucky that so much attention has been paid to the discipline of computer performance evaluation by so many talented people over the years. There is a small but very active Special Interest Group of the Association of Computing Machinery called SIGMETRICS (see http://www.sigmetrics.org) devoted to the study of performance evaluation. There are many good university programs where topics in performance evaluation are taught and Ph.D. candidates are trained. For practitioners, there is a large professional association called the Computer Measurement Group (http://www.cmg.org) that sponsors an annual conference in December. The regular SIGMETRICS and CMG publications contain a wealth of invaluable material for the practicing performance analyst.

It is also fortunate that one of the things computers are good for is counting. It is easy to augment both hardware and software to keep track of what they are doing, although keeping the measurement overhead from overwhelming the amount of useful work being done is a constant worry. Over time, most vendors have embraced the idea of building measurement facilities into their products, and at times are even able to position them to competitive advantage because their measurement facilities render them more manageable. A system that provides measurement feedback is always more manageable than one that is a black box.

Users of Windows 2000 are fortunate that Microsoft has gone to the trouble of building ...