Your Troubleshooting PAL

How many times have you been faced with a performance issue with a computer and you don't really know where to start? Sure, you can fire up Performance Monitor (perfmon) and start collecting data for analysis, but which counters do you collect and how do you identify a bottleneck?

Perfmon can gather tons of information and pouring over all that data for analysis can be a daunting task. Enter Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL), a new and powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log in any known format and analyzes it using complex, but known thresholds. The tool produces an HTML report which reports important performance counters and displays alerts when thresholds are exceeded.

PAL is a free open source application developed by Microsoft and is hosted on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. It requires two other free pieces of software on the computer where PAL will run:

Log Parser 2.2
Log parser is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory. PAL uses the Log Parser tool to query perform logs and to create charts and graphs for the PAL report.

Microsoft Office Web Components 2003
Log Parser requires the Office Web Components 2003 in order to create charts.

Note: Because there is no 64-bit version of the Microsoft Office Web Components, PAL only runs on x86 platform computers.

To use PAL, you begin by collecting performance data from the target machine using perfmon. Typically, I collect the Memory, Network Interface, Physical Disk, Processor and System counters to begin with. Once you've collected some data run PAL and walk through the wizard. Be sure to answer the Question Variable Names at the bottom of the Threshold File page. The variables are Number of Processors, use of the /3GB switch, is the target a 64-bit computer, total RAM and whether it has a kernel dump configured. Step through the rest of the wizard and PAL will create a batch file, run it and display the output as a graphical report in your web browser. Very cool!!!

You can view a LiveMeeting streaming video training of PAL here.

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Have you examined your Pagefile lately?

Whenever you build a new server or workstation Windows automatically sets the pagefile size based on the amount of RAM available. Usually, it sets the minimum amount of RAM to 1.5X RAM and the maximum to 2X RAM. So, for a server with 2GB RAM the pagefile minimum might be 3072MB and the maximum size might be 4096MB.

That might work well for your base build, but what about after you add the applications you built the server to do? The pagefile requirements change dramatically after you install SQL, Exchange, antivirus, etc.

You can view the pagefile settings by checking your system settings (Right-click Computer Properties Advanced tab Performance settings Advanced Change). Take a look at the Recommended setting, as in the example in this article.

I recommend setting the Initial size to the Recommended size (4509MB in the example above), and the Maximum size to 2x RAM (8096MB for this server). This will have a truly awesome affect on server performance! I especially find big performance gains in Exchange and SQL.

It's interesting to note that even though Windows recommends 4509MB for a pagefile, the system's currently allocated pagefile size is only the inital size. You would think that Windows would adjust the pagefile up to the maximum size of 4096MB, but it doesn't.

I recommend taking a look at your pagefile settings after installing your applications and occasionally (maybe every 6 months) while in production and adjust as needed.

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