[thelist] performance monitoring?

[Scott Dexter]

> -----Original Message-----
> A)  Can someone point me to a "Web Site Performance 101" type 
> article/reference?  One that uses really, really short words 
> and preferably has directions on how to set up what it is 
> that they are talking about?
> 

The first thing I'd recommend is to lobby for your own NT server. With a
hosted solution, you may not be able to have the control over the server
that you'd like to tweak it out (a lot of the place you can squeeze out
performance in IIS is at the OS/registry/IIS Metabase level --which I
seriously doubt your provider will let you have access to). You can acquire
your own server and co-locate it with an ISP for your bandwidth (contact me
offlist for details, its what we do here at work and it's *wonderful*).

That being said, excellent IIS performance articles abound, here are a
couple:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/IIS/Tips/asptips.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/server/feature/tune.asp

And searching for "ASP performance" on http://evolt.org/ brings up:

1. Another Good ASP Performance Article
Author: odyssey; 04/24/2000; Reviews & Links 
[Comments: 1] - [not rated]    
2. *THE* Article for ASP Performance
Author: odyssey; 01/13/2000; Reviews & Links 
[Comments: 1] - [not rated]    
3. ASP Performance tips
Author: MartinB; 08/12/1999; Backend 
[Comments: 2] - [Rating: 4 - Ratings: 1]  

I hope these are at the level you are looking for, if not, let me know, and
I'll be happy to translate =)

> B)  You all are professionals - what do you monitor? Why?  
> What do you do with the statistics?  Is the built-in 
> Performance Monitor tool good enough, or is there a 
> significant business reason that you would recommend another tool?

The built in performance monitor is okay, and there are ways to watch it
without staring at the screen
(http://evolt.org/article/NT_Alerts_Delivered_to_Your_Mailbox/18/578/index.h
tml) --but there is a program called InetMonitor (from MS) that lets you
look at IIS specifically
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/server/feature/server042798.asp). 

As far as what I do with the stats, I have a couple things set up to fire
off alarms as the events happen but I don't keep the stats for long; we
haven't had to retain historical data (yet).

Hope this helps you get started; performance monitoring and tweaking is
somewhat a black art, and some of us (Dan) go all gaga over it....

sgd
--
work: http://www.ti3.com/
non: http://thinksafely.org/