Analyzing server power consumption and costs

Server power consumption is rapidly becoming a hot topic in the IT industry.  For many data centers, the cost of powering servers has become a top budget item.  In fact, in 2008, the average cost of power used by a server exceeded its purchase price (1). Nationally, the EPA estimated data center electricity consumption to … [Read more…]

Leverage the Top 10 Performance Improvements in IIS 7.0

This month, TechNet Magazine published my article about the top IIS 7.0 features you can use to unlock the performance potential of your web server.  You can read it at Top 10 Performance Improvements in IIS 7.0. IIS 7.0 improves on the already solid performance of its predecessor in quite a few places. However, this … [Read more…]

Make your next IIS 7.0 web server a lean one

Among IT circles, IIS 7.0’s modularity is definitely one of its most welcomed traits.  It promises a significantly reduced surface area, lightweight management overhead, and better performance. Or, in other words, you can use IIS 7.0 build lean web servers. Ever wonder how far you can go with modularizing IIS 7.0? Actually, you can go … [Read more…]

WCAT 6.3 web performance and scalability test tool released

Download: wcat.doc The NT Performance team just publically released the latest version of WCAT (Web Capacity Analysis Tool), the web performance test tool that the IIS team and NT Performance team use to conduct internal performance and scalability testing of IIS and ASP.NET. ****************************** UPDATE 1/24/2008: Updated WCAT 6.3 build is available that fixes the “NULL … [Read more…]

Before the flight: Native Output Cache, PHP and FastCGI, and other stuff

I am sitting on a stack of juicy topics I’ve been meaning to post about, but I ran out of time taking care of last minute business before leaving the office for the long-awaited Thanksgiving vacation. So, in the meantime, here are some interesting stuff to check out: IIS7’s Native Output Cache – Kanwal, our … [Read more…]