Future Planning

Capacity planning is an ongoing process. It requires continually monitoring the use of the server to ensure that there are sufficient resources for an optimal user experience. Over time, most deployments experience a significant growth in both the number of users and the amount of content accessed.

Monitoring Performance Counters

You can use performance counters to help you monitor the performance of the SharePoint Portal Server computer, to assist you in troubleshooting, and to assist you in capacity planning.

The % Processor Time counter on the Processor performance object is an excellent general mechanism for monitoring the current level of activity on the server. This counter should be below 80 percent during periods of peak usage. If the counter exceeds this amount, the user experiences poor performance. In this case, it is likely that your server has inadequate resources to provide peak performance. Either you can deploy a server with more CPU resources, or you deploy an additional server to host an index workspace.

The Available Mbytes counter on the Memory performance object should always exceed 5 MB. If this counter is below 5 MB, the server experiences dramatically increased disk activity causing severely reduced user performance.

The disk volumes storing the SharePoint Portal Server documents and indexes should have more than 10 MB of free space at all times. If the free space falls below this amount, it is necessary to add more disk space to accommodate additional documents.

If you want to monitor the average time taken to perform a document management function such as check-in, copy, or publish, see the SharePoint Portal Document Management Server object, Successful Checkins Latency, Successful Copies Latency, and Successful Publishes Latency counters. For more information about the SharePoint Portal Document Management Server object and related counters, see Appendix B, For More Information.

Managing Resources

SharePoint Portal Server includes resource usage controls for the two resource-intensive processes that SharePoint Portal Server computers commonly perform. These processes are searching and index creation. You can configure the server to give each process a higher or a lower priority.

You can balance resource usage to optimize performance according to your server configuration. If you plan to distribute searching and index creation across multiple servers, dedicate resources on one or more servers to searching and resources on another server or servers to index creation. If you are using one server to accomplish both tasks, you must balance your settings. By default, SharePoint Portal Server distributes resources evenly between the search resource usage and the indexing resource usage controls.

With the Background usage setting, the server gives higher priority to other applications. With the Dedicated usage setting, the server reserves most of the system resources for searching or creating an index. For example, if the server is primarily dedicated to creating and updating indexes, adjust Search resource usage to Background and Indexing resource usage to Dedicated.

If you use this server to run other applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server^™, avoid adjusting the controls to Dedicated or near-Dedicated usage for either searching or index creation because this setting may affect resources that are dedicated to those applications.

For more information about setting resource usage, see Appendix B.