Case Study: Performance Problems with a New Process


SCENARIO

ESSENCE OF THE CASE

The following points summarize the essence of the case study:

  • The system has just had a new application installed.

  • The application runs continuously as a service to local and remote users.

  • After several days of continuous running, the system performance degrades.

  • Rebooting the system temporarily solves the problem. However, it eventually returns.

  • Available memory is consumed, and paging activity increases .


You have installed a new custom-developed program that runs continuously in the background as a Windows service. You and a number of remote users who are accessing data on your system use this program. When you first install it, you run the Performance console on your system to establish a baseline of performance during normal working conditions. A few days later, your system becomes sluggish and noticeably slower in all functions. You reboot your system, and it appears to be working normally again. A few days later, the same performance problems occur again. You run the Performance console and discover that the amount of available memory has dropped to almost 0 and the paging file is very active.

ANALYSIS

When dealing with performance problems, you must remember that almost everything is inter-related with everything else. Memory problems can cause disk activity, which can manifest itself as a processor bottleneck. In this case, because the problem was apparently solved when the system was restarted, the problem is likely related to consumption of a resource rather than an elevated rate of activity. When the problem occurred again days later, the Performance console showed a higher than expected paging activity and almost no available memory. That combination would normally indicate a system that is underconfigured in memory for the process running. Because this situation did not exist when the new application was brought online, the conclusion is that the new background service leaks memory. In this situation, memory acquired by the service during normal processing is not returned to the system. Over time, the amount of working memory assigned to the service would exceed the amount available, and Windows would begin to page to meet the needs of its normal workload. The recommendation would be to send the new service back to the developers for analysis.



MCSE Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure (Exam 70-293)
MCSE 70-293 Exam Prep: Planning and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0789736500
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 151
Authors: Will Schmied

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