Clint Huffman's Windows Troubleshooting in the Field Blog
Clint Huffman is a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE) who has been with Microsoft for over 10 years. This blog documents the challenges he faces week to week in hopes that these experiences will help others.
Available for pre-order: Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide
Yay! After over a year in development, my book, the “Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide”, is...
Date: 07/10/2014
How to create a “black box” performance counter data collector
I highly encourage my customers to run a “black box” performance counter data collector set on their...
Date: 05/23/2014
Using Autoruns to validate system drivers
Recently, one of my enterprise customers had a system crash popularly known as a “blue screen...
Date: 11/21/2013
Convert a performance counter data collector template into a PAL threshold file
If you want to have all of the counters in a counter log be represented in a PAL report, then use...
Date: 11/18/2013
Tracking page file reads and writes
The only real way of knowing if a page file is actually being “read from” is to get a file IO...
Date: 10/16/2013
Full debugging of VBScripts using Visual Studio 2005
Want to do full debugging of a VBScripts, then use this procedure. One of the hardest parts about...
Date: 09/30/2013
My personal reminder of common debugging commands
I don’t get as many opportunities to debug as I would like, but when I do, I always forget the...
Date: 08/15/2013
Detecting ephemeral port exhaustion
Symptoms When Windows or Windows Server is out of ephemeral/outbound/dynamic network ports, it will...
Date: 08/09/2013
Physical memory overwhelmed PAL analysis - holy grail found!
I just wrote a very complicated PAL analysis that determines if physical memory is overwhelmed. This...
Date: 06/11/2013
Should the paging file be moved from C: drive?
Should the paging file be moved from C: drive to another drive? This was the question I received...
Date: 06/07/2013
PAL processing, processors, and threads
I commonly get questioned on what response should be given to the NumberOfProcessors question...
Date: 01/14/2013
PAL collector script – PalCollector.ps1
One of the top questions I get with the PAL tool is what data to collect. As many of you know, the...
Date: 01/08/2013
How to create a threshold file for the PAL tool
The Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool is an open source project at https://pal.codeplex.com...
Date: 01/08/2013
Page Frame Number (PFN) database
I just finished writing an article on the public, wiki, PFE PerfGuide on the subject of the Page...
Date: 01/06/2013
Memory combining in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
I’ve spent that last few weeks studying the memory architecture of Windows 8 and Windows Server...
Date: 11/29/2012
Can a process be limited on how much physical memory it uses?
I've been asked a lot of great questions lately and thought I'd post some of them. As you might...
Date: 10/11/2012
My IIS7 PowerShell Scripts
I regularly go onsite with enterprise customers of Microsoft and do Microsoft Internet Information...
Date: 12/04/2011
How to Speak SAN-ish
I recently signed a contract with MCP Magazine to publish articles. This is effectively a...
Date: 05/13/2011
The Microsoft TechNet Wiki Performance Guide (PerfGuide)
One of the major reasons why I haven’t been blogging much is because I have spent most of my “free”...
Date: 03/28/2011
The PAL Tool on Memory Leaks
To prevent a process from crashing due to a System.OutOfMemory condition, the .NET garbage collector...
Date: 03/28/2011
My Incredible Week at TechEd 2010
I attended TechEd 2010 this week and it was great! I met a lot of great people and had a great time....
Date: 06/11/2010
PAL v2.0’s New Counter Generation Feature is Powerful
So, I’ve been playing with generating counters within PAL to compare ratios of SQL Server Full Scans...
Date: 03/02/2010
Choose Your Own Adventure: User Mode Versus Privileged Mode Processor Usage
You have arrived at this point in the adventure because you have identified high processor usage on...
Date: 02/20/2010
Choose Your Own Adventure: Start Here
You have arrived here because you suspect a performance problem with your Microsoft Windows computer...
Date: 02/20/2010
W3C IIS Log Analysis using Log Parser
I was recently on the PowerScripting Podcast where we talked about the PAL tool and the challenges...
Date: 01/07/2010
About the Author – Clint Huffman
Originally from Dayton, OH. Clint joined Microsoft in 1999 supporting web technologies,...
Date: 12/03/2009
The Case of the Mysterious Black Box
I haven’t had any performance analysis challenges lately, but there is a lot of confusion as to how...
Date: 11/18/2009
The Case of the Add-on Crashers
While on "vacation" in Ohio last month, a good friend of mine called me up saying that...
Date: 09/04/2009
The Case of the Relentless Cookie Monster
Introduction Okay, I'm finally back from my 3 weeks of vacation. We went back to Dayton, Ohio to...
Date: 08/23/2009
The Case of the Phantom Hard Page Faults
I am teaching this week, so I figured I would talk about a case I had a few months ago. I have...
Date: 07/16/2009
The Case of the High CPU Web Server
This week I was off to Phoenix, AZ again, but for a different customer this time. Phoenix is very...
Date: 07/09/2009
The Case of the Out of Memory BizTalk Server
About a month ago, I was conducting a BizTalk Health Check for a customer (yes, Microsoft BizTalk...
Date: 07/07/2009
Another Case of the Missing PTEs
I did an IIS Health Check (IISHC) this week and found another 32-bit Windows 2003 web server that...
Date: 06/18/2009
The Case of the Missing PTEs
It was a dark and stormy night… actually it was sunny and clear, but just thought I’d start this...
Date: 06/16/2009
Starting my blog off again
I'm re-starting off my Windows Performance blog here. I originally wanted my full name of...
Date: 05/12/2009