Windows 2000 Performance Guide: Help for Administrators and Application Developers

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.

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.