Category Archives: Performance

How to quickly and easily simulate a low disk space scenario

Posted on 14. October 2017 by admin

It turns out that the built in fsutil OS utility can quickly create an empty file of any size.  For example: fsutil file createnew test.txt 1300000000 Will create a file 100 billion bytes in size. For my scenario I needed to … Continue reading →

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Missing Index Stats Enhancements

Posted on 8. April 2016 by Bennett

Here is my script to find missing indexes using the missing index DMVs. It’s pretty much like others with the exception that I first get the instance uptime and then use that to calculate the number of seeks and scans … Continue reading →

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Troubleshooting beyond the database

Posted on 30. May 2013 by admin

Users were seeing transient performance slowdowns every day between 15:00 and 16:00.  The slowdowns would typically last for 2-3 minutes and occur one or more times during this time window.  After looking at things on the SQL Server and database … Continue reading →

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Free SQL Server training videos

Posted on 16. February 2011 by admin

The people over at SQLSkills.com have made their MCM training videos available online for free.  They’re pretty incredible.  Subject areas include database internals and performance, high availability and disaster recovery, performance tuning,  security and development support.  Link here:  http://www.sqlskills.com/T_MCMVideos.asp   … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, SQL Server | 1 Comment

Partition Misalignment can Cause Poor Performance

Posted on 1. April 2008 by Bennett

Here is an interesting Microsoft Knowledgebase article titled Disk performance may be slower than expected when you use multiple disks in Windows Server 2003, in Windows XP, and in Windows 2000. It explains how a partition misalignment can cause significant … Continue reading →

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Using Diskpart to Align a Windows Disk Partition

Posted on 31. March 2008 by Bennett

There is an EMC whitepaper titled Using diskpar and diskpart to align partitions on Windows Basic and Dynamic Disks. This paper describes how legacy Windows issues cause a single disk I/O to span multiple tracks. This puts an unnecessary load … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Windows OS | 6 Comments

Starting Windows Performance Logging at boot time

Posted on 3. March 2008 by Bennett

Performance logging will not start on its own at boot time. Here’s how to get around that problem.   Applies to: W2k3, XP Using the Performance MMC, create a set of counter logs. Use a specific name to save the … Continue reading →

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