I did well with this chapter, with 13/15 in the assessment questions at the end. I put that down to a bit of an obsession about machine performance, and the developer background. Starting, stopping and killing processes is the fare of the development process.

And performance monitoring with its graphs and counters is the nearest you get to a proper computer with flashing lights, so I’ve always had a play in there too.

And on a more serious theme I’ve used all of this stuff when those big multi-processor servers aren’t doing what is expected with a web site. All those subsystems in a web infrastructure can cause a problem, and I’ve sadly dealt with too many infrastructure dudes who stop at the base O/S and won’t go any further up the application stack. And of course, the appropriate remedy isn’t always a rebuild, even if you have a machine image and can get it back in 30 minutes. To the base O/S of course.

So you have to know how to use these tools to get your web farm, associated DC and database cluster all running sweetly.