NT Performance Tuning

Tools of the trade

• NT Diagnostics: you can check many NT settings (memory, resources, services, environment, etc). You will use it to see how NT is setup.

• Performance Monitor: let you select items for you to monitor NT Performance. See Table 1 of this basic NT tuning tutorial.

• Control Panel and Registry: the basic tools to make changes in NT settings. Be careful when editing the Registry.

• Disk defragmenter: NT also creates file fragments like DOS, but not so badly. The most popular defragmenters are Norton SpeedDisk and Diskeeper (the Lite version is free).

What to tune

• general performance: see this article for NT Workstation basic tune-up. Again refer to this article.

• CPU performance: processes are the basic units to control for. The performance monitor has a variety of statistics for you to see the processor load. Task manager also let you see a very simplified picture of the processor performance, as you learned previously. Using these statistics you can see if you need to upgrade your processor. But, using other tools like PView you can see what each process is doing to your machine.

• Memory performance: You should set the virtual memory at least to 1.5 times the physical memory. To set the virtual memory, right-click on the System (My Computer) icon and select properties. In the System properties choose Change virtual memory and in the Virtual Memory dialog select the size and in what drives to create the swap file. In addition to VM size you will also need to deal with memory leaks. The resource kit has tools for Diagnosting and Monitoring Memory Leaks.

• Disk performance: Again the Performance monitor can tell you if disk accesses, etc, are affecting your performance. You should always start your tune-up by defragmenting your hard-drives. Particularly you should try to optimize NTFS performance, and avoid organizing your partitions using FAT (16 or DOS formatting).

• Networking: much of the other performance considerations will depend in your ability to tune the network performance of NT. You can use very simple tools like netstat at the command prompt to see what is happening. You can also use the performance monitor, object: Server and select Bytes Total/sec, TCP:Segments Received/sec, etc. A full discussion of network performance is beyond the scope of an OS course.

This page is maintained by Al Bento who can be reached at abento@ubmail.ubalt.edu This page was last updated on March 9, 2000. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.