CIS 170F: Windows 7 Administration

Week 9

Performance Tuning
Performance Tuning Overview
Recognizing Bottlenecks

  • A bottleneck occurs when a limitation in a single computer system component slows down the entire system.
  • The most common bottlenecks to system performance are:
    • Disk: Disk bottlenecks occur when applications want to read and write information to the physical disk faster than the disk can manage.
    • Some of the options to increase disk performance are:

      • Upgrade the drive controller
      • Upgrade the disks
      • Implement RAID0 or RAID5
      • Move the paging file to a nonsystem disk
    • Memory: Memory bottlenecks occur when the applications require more memory than is physically available in the computer.
    • Some of the options to reduce the use of virtual memory are:

      • Increase the amount of physical memory:
      • Run fewer applications at once
    • Processor: Processor bottlenecks occur when there is too much work for a processor to do.
    • Some of the options to resolve processor bottlenecks are:

      • Change to a faster processor: Processor performance is traditionally measured by clock speed.
      • Add additional processors: Windows 7 supports up to two physical processors.
      • Change to a multicore processor: Many processors are now multicore, which effectively means there are multiple processors on a single chip. A dual-core processor increases processing capacity and reduces memory consumption versus simply adding a faster processor.
    • Network: Network bottlenecks are more common for servers than computers running Windows 7. Multiple computers accessing a single server may overwhelm the network connection to the server.

    Read more about processor bottlenecks at:
    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750967.aspx.