Windows Nt Performance Monitoring, Benchmarking, and Tuning (Paperback)

Very well organised, this book employs a logical flow, from an overview of specific systems, to what can go wrong them and how to fix it. The book supplements its troubleshooting diagnoses with brief case studies presented to illustrate points. These studies present a problem, discuss it and ultimately prove a solution in just a few paragraphs.

An exceptional feature of this book lists theories behind many of the items affecting performance characteristics and attributes. A primary example elaborates on the OSI model and how it relates to NT networking and general queuing theory, including the role played by CPU (all of which is accompanied by a readable analogy to lines at a cashier).

Practical advice crops up throughout the volume. For instance, if interrupts/sec are dominating the system (especially if the system is old or has recently been moved), the book recommends checking your adapter cards to ensure that they have not popped out of their slots.

Even with its superior content, the book leaves much to be desired in terms of style and editing. Redundancy takes the crown for glaring style problems, in which readers find sentences beginning with terms like "The microkernel" or "SMP Operations" within the same paragraph. The book also has its fair share of typos. These items don't typically affect how understandable or readable the text is, but it could have withstood a more thorough editing, nonetheless.

If you are looking for a tightly focused book on Windows NT performance and tuning, this is a solid choice. --John Keogh, Amazon.com

Topics covered: Windows NT architecture, performance monitoring tools, logs, simulating systems bottlenecks, setting performance objectives, network performance, network traffic issues, CPU performance, memory performance, paging, disk performance, network interface performance, practical tuning techniques and performance monitor counters.

Windows NT Performance: Monitoring, Benchmarking and Tuning provides a one-stop source for sound technical information on doing everything necessary to fine tune your network. From monitoring to benchmarking, from analyzing performance numbers to isolating and solving resource bottlenecks, the authors provide a reliable blueprint for ensuring optimal Windows NT performance.