Chapter 17 -- Configuration and Performance Monitoring

Chapter 17

In the previous chapter, we looked at the most important aspects of performance—those affected by design, prototyping, indexing, and query writing. You can also improve system performance by tuning your system configuration, but this is unlikely to yield as much gain as a design change. It's even more critical that your system not be misconfigured. You might see only a 5 percent improvement in performance by moving from a reasonable configuration to an ideal configuration, but a badly misconfigured system can kill your application's performance.

This chapter discusses configuration options for Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. It includes guidelines for setting important values and suggests improvements (which will often be minor at best). You'll also learn how to use the two most essential monitoring tools: SQL Profiler and System Monitor.