Performance monitoring in Windows Server 2008 R2

Tune-Up

Article from ADMIN 06/2011

By Thomas Joos

Performance can be a problem if you run additional services like Sharepoint, Exchange, or SQL on a Windows server. Luckily, the Windows tools described here can help administrators identify and resolve these problems.

The Performance Monitor in Windows Server 2008 R2 is a powerful tool for identifying performance issues. Compared with the previous version, very little has changed in terms of control. The tool is available in the Server Manager below Diagnostics | Perf | Monitoring Tools | Performance Monitor . However, you might prefer to take the shortcut and type perfmon.msc in the Start menu search box. Typing perfmon /res launches the Resource Monitor, which gives you the current resource use in real time, as in the Task Manager.

Exchange and Active Directory

When performance problems occur in Exchange or other services that depend on Active Directory (e.g., when accessing mailboxes or sending messages), often they are caused by a problem in Active Directory or DNS. Thus, you will want to run diagnostics for name resolution and your domain controllers parallel to performance monitoring – for example, using dcdiag.exe for Exchange. But, other services that require the Windows directory service use the wldap32.dll system files to access Active Directory. The following simplified processes occur:

The wldap32.dll file on the Exchange server receives a request to access the global catalog from the Exchange process.
The server uses DNS to resolve the global catalog server and thus access it. If this takes too long, access to Active Directory is delayed as early as this point.
Following name resolution, wldap32.dll opens a connection to the global catalog and transfers the request.
A TCP connection is established and an LDAP request is issued. For this connection to work, the TCP connection needs three acknowledgements from the domain controller. Assuming a latency of 10ms on the network, the access attempts will take 30ms before the Exchange server can transfer the LDAP

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