Amazon.co.uk 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 optimising
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 behaviour 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 book fits into the "blue" series of system administration books of which it's a member. Software engineers--particularly those engaged in designing highly scalable applications for
Windows 2000--will get a lot from this book, 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 their instruction comes in the form of laboratory narratives in which they describe symptoms, systematic observations (i.e., how Perfmon was used for diagnosis), and corrective adjustments. In most cases, the authors describe 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.
James Cox, Midwest Book Review, April 2002
A solid, comprehensive, and enthusiastically recommended core reference title fore anyone who depends on Windows 2000 to get the job done.
