What are the Areas of servers to check for the Slowness of Application Hosted in W2K SP4 server?

Question

Hi, Any one of you could you please help me out, what are the areas of the server we can check and what way if an application hosted in W2K SP4 server is creating problem with slowness of the applicatin performance and the application is at a time is used by not more than 250 users and all the users are using considerable band width.

Answer 1

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Answer 2

You have several choke points. Most of them can be monitored over time using the proper counters in performance monitor. (Task manager can give you a real-time look at only a few. Perfmon is the only way to monitor all of them.
1. Network bandwidth. With 250 users all trying to hit the same server, all using "considerable bandwidth", you could have choke points all through your network. The first place to look would be the server. Monitor performance on the NIC to see how much bandwidth is being utilized. Assuming that's your choke point: If you've got a 10/100 card, upgrade to a Gb NIC. If you're already at a Gig, add another Gig NIC and either multihome your server (round robin, split your users... several ways to do it) or do port trunking to create a 2Gb pipeline. Check your network hardware (switches, routers, etc.) to ensure they can facilitate the bandwidth load.
2. RAM. More is always better. Monitor your RAM usage over time and add more as appropriate.
3. Processor. Again, more is better. Monitor your processor utilization over time. Upgrade your proc. if that's the issue.
4. Disk access. Monitor your disk access speeds to see how hard you're hitting the drives. If this is the problem, get faster/better drives, add drives to your RAID array, spread the load over more controllers, etc.
The truth is, if you've got 250 users hitting one server all at the same time, all with "considerable bandwidth" usage, its time to cluster. It's also time to upgrade to 2003.
Finally, if you're asking this question and running that intensive an application on an old W2K box for 250 users... either your company needs to seriously reconsider its investment in IT hardware infrastructure, or you have no business running that big a network.