Posts Tagged ‘Performance’
SBS 2008 Disk Backup Performance
Saturday, June 5th, 2010
I’ve heard people talk about the impact of backups on their server. With disk based backups being more common place these days, I thought I’d take a look at one on my test server. This screenshot shows a base Windows 2008 server doing a backup direct to a USB 2.0 connected 2TB drive (1 x 1TB in RAID0 configuration). You can see the low level impact that this is having on the CPU right now – barely registering at all. Disk however is pretty solid at around the 50MB/second which is great throughput for a USB 2.0 connected device. What this means however is that the disk subsystem on this server is really being used a fair bit at this point in time and whilst CPU utilisation is low, any other disk based operation you might be performing will suffer. You need to bear this in mind when you configure your SBS 2008 backups, as you can configure them to run every 30 minutes if you choose, but I recommend that you run them every 2 hours at most to minimise the potential for performance problems
Tags: Backup, Performance, SBS 2008
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »
Windows 7 – Performance Improvements
Monday, November 30th, 2009
One of the bigger claims to fame with Windows 7 are the massive performance improvements. Naturally I was sceptical about the claims as most performance improvements are statistically measured rather than having a real effect on the ability of the user to get things done faster. As you’ll know from my previous Windows 7 blog post, I upgraded my laptop in place. Therefore I’ve got a pretty good idea on how long it takes to do any given tasks. I’ve not measured how long it takes to do any given task, but I know from how it feels what is fast and what is slow.
I’ve got to say that after just a few hours with Windows 7, I NOTICED the performance improvements from Windows 7. Firstly Windows 7 takes a lot less time to come out of suspend mode than before – it takes about 3 seconds from opening my screen to having a logon screen and then another 2 seconds after that to give me the desktop – that’s 5 seconds in total! It used to take anywhere up to say 30 seconds to do the same thing under Vista.
The other things I’ve noticed are marked improvements in the normal file open and save operations. Word responds far more snappily now when I go to open files. Outlook moves from window to window as if it was skating on ice.
There are many more improvements that I’ve “felt” over time that I can’t quantify, however I do feel that Windows 7 has given me an extra 45minutes to an hour a day back in not the way it performs so much better than Vista did.. or even Windows XP for that matter.
Tags: Performance, Windows 7
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »