Windows 2000 Performance Guide [Paperback]

Mark Friedman (Author), Odysseas Pentakalos (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2002

It is characteristic of most computer systems that they do not degrade gradually. The painful reality is that performance is acceptable day after day, until quite suddenly it all falls apart. When this happens, the administrator needs to be prepared to help the organization get through the crisis.

Computer applications are growing ever more intelligent and easy to use. One of the by-products of making applications easier to use is that they usually also require more resources to run. And wherever productivity is a central factor in the decisions you make, performance considerations loom large and continue to play an important role in system management.

Are you wondering, for example, if more expensive equipment would give better performance? The answer is often yes, but not always. This book will show you why it is important to understand the performance characteristics of the hardware and of the workload, and how they match up against each other. Windows 2000 Performance Guide takes you through problem solving techniques like measurement methodology, workload characterization, benchmarking, decomposition techniques, and analytic queuing models.

This book covers:

• Processor performance
• Application profiling and hardware considerations
• Multiprocessing
• Memory and paging
• File cache
• Disk performance
• Networking
• IIS

The horror stories of failed development projects that did not meet cost and performance specifications reflect the fact that expectations about what computer technology can do far exceed the reality. Even as hardware performance continues to improve, managing performance will not get perceptibly easier. This book will give you the tools and information you need to meet the challenges of performance management now and in the future.

Many of the popular computer books out there promise easy answers, but this is the only book for those tricky situations that have no direct precedent. Windows 2000 Performance Guide will give you the information and the conceptual framework to become your own Windows 2000 performance expert.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The load your users place on your Windows 2000 servers may increase approximately linearly over time, but that's no guarantee that the servers' performance will degrade smoothly and predictably. Rather--and this is the crux of Windows 2000 Performance Guide--a modest increase in workload can often cause a significant, even catastrophic, decrease in overall performance. The reason: Servers are complex systems, with each of their parts dependent upon many others. Your job in optimizing Windows 2000 machines is to spot the critical thresholds (preferably in advance) and adjust your systems to stay clear of them. Mark Friedman and Odysseas Pentakalos have done a considerable amount of empirical research into the behavior of all major Windows 2000 subsystems (and make frequent, detailed reference to the research of others) and present their findings here. Their approach is somewhat academic (you can't accurately describe performance without some calculations and statistics, as well as some theoretical discussion of operating system design), but there's no question that this volume fits into the "blue" series of system administration books. Software engineers--particularly those engaged in designing highly scalable applications for Windows 2000--will get a lot from this title, as well.

For starters, the authors go into depth on what the traces available in Performance Monitor mean--valuable stuff for a system administrator who's unclear on what "Context switches / sec" and "Thread % User Time" (to cite one example) have to say about how efficiently available resources are being used. Most of the instruction comes in the form of laboratory narratives that describe symptoms, systematic observations (i.e., how Perfmon was used for diagnosis), and corrective adjustments. In most cases, the authors explain the relative merits of better hardware, parallel hardware, application tuning, and other alternative solutions, but leave it up to readers to best resolve their own systems' particular troubles. --David Wall

Topics covered: The subsystems of Microsoft Windows 2000, how they interact, and how they affect overall system performance under different applications. Performance Monitor is dealt with in depth, as are the performance characteristics of CPUs (single and parallel), memory and paging, disk access and caching, network access, and Internet services. Threads and their priorities are explained in easily understood detail.

About the Author

Mark Friedman began his career as a programmer for the DuPont Corporation in 1977 and has been in the computer field ever since. He has a master's degree in computer science from Temple University and is the founder and president of Demand Technology Software. He has written numerous technical articles, conducts training seminars in Windows performance, and publishes a monthly newsletter. Currently, he is working on the design and development of professional software tools for Windows performance management.

Odysseas Pentakalos has been an independent consultant for 10 years, dealing with performance modeling and tuning of computer systems, as well as object-oriented design and development. His clients have included major government agencies and corporations such as NASA, the Army Research Lab, Sun Microsystems, and Concert Communications. Odysseas received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland. He has published papers on performance topics in conferences, journals, and commercial publications.

Product Details

• Paperback: 718 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (January 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565924665
• ISBN-13: 978-1565924666
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,563,475 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For anyone who depends on Windows 2000 to get the job done, April 11, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Windows 2000 Performance Guide (Paperback)

Windows 2000 Performance Guide by computer experts Mark Friedman and Odysseas Pentakalos is a comprehensive, "user friendly" reference specifically designed for system administrators. Individual chapters cover processor performance, optimizing applications, multiprocessing, file caches, internet server performance and much more. Solid, closely researched, and illustrated with numerous examples using black-and-white photographs of computer screens to clearly outline the next step to be taken, Windows 2000 Performance Guide is a solid, comprehensive, and enthusiastically recommended core reference title for anyone who depends on Windows 2000 to get the job done.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Have Book!, February 21, 2002

By 

Daniel Menasce (Fairfax, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Windows 2000 Performance Guide (Paperback)

The performance of today networked operating systems is of paramount importance to the success of applications such as high-volume Web and E-commerce sites and I/O intensive database applications. "Windows 2000 Performance Guide," by Friedman and Pentakalos, must be read by any serious computer professional concerned with the performance of Windows operating systems. The authors have done a superb job of putting into words and pictures the wealth of knowledge they accumulated over the years. The book is extremely well-written, rigorous, easy to read, and covers a wide-range of issues from memory management to file systems, from single disks to disk arrays, from single to multiprocessors, from basic networking to Web servers. This is the definitive guide to Windows 2000 and related operating systems performance.

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, Broad coverage of performance matters, March 5, 2008

By 

J. S. Hardman "Consultant software developer ... (Near London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Windows 2000 Performance Guide (Paperback)

I bought this book whilst doing performance analysis of an existing data distribution server. On the whole I am very impressed by this book - it covers a very broad range of performance matters (I won't bother listng them - much of the book can be previewed on the publisher's web-site). From a developer's point of view it is a little light on some areas, but these are mainly areas that an administrator doing tuning of an existing system would often not be looking at. For an administrator tuning existing systems it is very good indeed and certainly reminded me to add a couple more bits to my report. It isn't really aimed at developers designing new systems, but I would certainly recommend it to developers who are concerned with performance.

A couple of things that I would have liked to have seen in the book are:
(1) More detailed descriptions of each metric in PerfMon, together with what constitutes a good value and what doesn't.
(2) Details about socket options - how to choose values and what the impact of changing them is.

All in all, very good.