12 substantial Windows performance problems that can cause the most frustration and chew up valuable time can be directly traced to a single source.
1. Slow Application Performance Familiar?. A company runs a large application such as EMR/EHR or ERP o which the entire enterprise depends, and users have to end wait endlessly for data. A sales team operating on a CRM application, and speaking with prospects loses the sale while waiting for data. It could be an LMS, used for the vital administration of educational programs. Other applications such as SharePoint, MS Exchange, VDI, POS and even legacy and proprietary apps all suffer from this same malady. The phone line and support desk tickets is overwhelmed with user complaints.
2. Application Crashses This t brings everything to a dead stop. Freezes and crashes are the biggest headaches of IT, there is nothing worse than angry users. When the application has crashed this will affect others accessing that application, too. When this happens, often a user will yell out, “What’s wrong with the computer?!” But of course, it’s not the computer. We’ll get to that at the end. Meanwhile, log files fill up, transactions or batch tasks don;t complete, and data gets corrupted. There may be downtime to reboot the server, or users may need to rekey data.
3. Missing SLA targets SLAs are the delivery backbone of many companies. Service quality and availability are service aspects written into contracts, and when those re not met, it not only means lost income, it can also mean lost business and clients. This is especially true today in a SaaS environment, in which a client can simply pull the plug and go to another provider. A primary cause of missed SLAs is slow performance. Yet again, it traces to the same source .
4. Slow Data Transfer Rates There are many reasons for heavy data transfer, including backups to other locations, and importing data to new locations, integrations and BI , When transfer rates are slow, it means waiting. And waiting. And waiting. This Windows performance problem eats up system as well as staff resources. Slow data transfer rates are traceable to this same source.
5. SQL Query Timeouts and Latency Enterprises run on data, which means they’re also living and dying on database queries. When a query is originated, the process through which the query was made will wait until the query is satisfied. The longer the wait (latency), the longer a data record, or computing resource is locked to other users. When a timeout occurs, that means that the query must be started again. This, of course, can mean a serious delay.
6. SQL Deadlocks This phenomenon occurs when two or more processes are waiting for the same resource. Each process is then waiting for the other process to complete before continuing. On the user end, SQL deadlocks produce the same result as timeouts: endless waiting.
7. SQL Server 15-Second Warnings An I/O request should complete within milliseconds. The 15-second warning that SQL Server has been waiting for longer than 15 seconds for an I/O request to complete indicates a serious performance problem—once again traceable to the same issue.
8. You Upgrade Hardware…but Performance Still Slow Many think the easy way to solve performance problems is to upgrade hardware. It can help but what happens when you upgrade hardware, and performance is still sluggish? This is a very expensive way to indicate that you have “solved” the wrong problem. Yes, performance was an issue, but the reason behind it was not hardware related. Yes, you guessed it: the cause is the same as all of these other problems.
9. Slow SSD Read/write Speed Companies install SSDs to improve performance—and given the substantial performance difference between SSDs and HDDs, that performance difference should be much better. Sometimes the read/write speed to SSDs is still slow because you’re still suffering from the same problem.
10. Storage Performance Problems Storage is very a sophisticated with solutions designed to improve storage performance. Performance problems you experience with storage are only partly due to the hardware…but to the same cause as the rest of these issues.
11. Slow Server Performance This is the generally sluggish performance phenomenon, the causes of which can be tough to trace down. For that reason, many don’t try—they just decide that hardware must be upgraded: new servers, new storage, perhaps even a new network. Slow server performance is most often rooted in the same cause as all of these other issues. Servers don’t come cheap and they consume utilities
12. VM Density and Consolidation Issues Its now common practice to consolidate several VMs into one physical server. The higher the VM density is, the more efficient the system may be but those Vms have to talk to each other and the system tBoth VM consolidation and VM density contain the same inherent performance problem as each of these other scenarios and may be preventing you from loading more VMs onto a single host.
The Basic Problem
All of these Windows performance problems that cost you peace of mind can be traced back storage I/O efficiencies.
Virtualization has been great for server efficiency, ba big downsides to virtualization is that it adds complexity to the data path – known as the I/O blender effect that mixes and randomizes I/O streams.
There are 2 severe I/O inefficiencies causing this.
The Windows file system will break up data ‘writes’ into separate storage I/Os and send each I/O packet down to the storage layer separately. This causes I/O characteristics that are much smaller, more fractured, and more random than they need to be – this along with the I/O Blender effect results in bad storage performance. This is a “death by a thousand cuts” scenario – everything is running, but not running nearly as fast as it could.
You could opt to throw more hardware at the problem, but this is expensive and disruptive and can be premature – it is much better to tune what you already own to get the performance of which the server is capable.
Storage I/O contention occurs when you have multiple systems all sharing the same storage resource.
Windows breaks up that I/O profile into a smaller, more fractured, more random I/O profile than it needs to be. when clean that up on one VM then all of the data from that one VM to the host is all streamlined, but then you have all the data from neighbor VMs that are still noisy and causing contention.
So, your performance is penalized once, twice by storage I/O efficiencies. This means systems process workloads are typically about 50% slower than they should on the typical Windows server. Far more I/O than s needed is used to process any given workload. This is a major cause of Windows performance problems
The Solution: ensure large, clean, and contiguous read and write I/Os from all sources, and eliminate the I/O blender effect.
Larger, cleaner, sequential I/Os result in fewer I/Os to process and thus faster data transfer rates for peak performance. In such a case, you can have 1G of data, but instead of transferring it in 100,000 I/Os, you can accomplish it in 70,000, or less.
The next factor is to read and to write I/Os sequentially, instead of randomly. When dealing with storage, sequential I/Os always out-perform random I/Os on hard disk drives, SSDs and flash storage.
These factors work together to transform the nature of the I/O to improve performance:
Larger I/O
Sequential I/O
Less I/O
The overall effect is that the OS workload is reduced, because there are fewer I/Os to process, and they are occurring sequentially.
DymaxIO
This is the solution brought into effect by the DymaxIO fast data software: (A software Solution for a software problem)
-Fewer I/Os, because they are larger
-Sequential I/Os
– Read I/O served from memory DymaxIO accomplishes these improvements through proprietary technology that optimizes and streamlines with both reads and writes.
Write performance: IntelliWrite® patented technology eliminates small, fractured I/Os caused by Windows splitting files into multiple write operations. DymaxIO enforces large, clean, contiguous writes for more payload with every I/O operation.
Read performance: IntelliMemory® patented technology reduces read I/Os from storage by caching hot data server-side. Reads are cached right at VM level from otherwise-idle, available DRAM. Not only does this enormously decrease the I/O latency time, but also decreases the I/O traffic to the storage unit, thus freeing up the storage bandwidth for other work.
Because of these substantial improvements, DymaxIO is able to regularly provide 30 to 40 percent faster data transfer speeds, eliminating a myriad of Windows performance problems.DymaxIO improves the performance and reliability of Windows systems.
Are your servers good candidates for DymaxIO ? Find out quickly and easily without investing a lot of time –
Our I/O Assessment Tool. will:
Analyze data across 11 performance metrics
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Graphs display averages and peaks for each hour
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