Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT) is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, its best selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Read full entry on Wikipedia

If you are hosting your web application in Windows Azure, here are some tips regarding monitoring your servers and application during a LoadStorm test that were provided to me from a Microsoft software engineer:

Sharing with you the steps for performance testing/bottleneck identification. Attaching all the requisite documents and counters.

Explanation of perfmon counters – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa905154(SQL.80).aspx

Other tools we use:

Ways to Use Perfmon Counters Config File via Command

So I sit here in my office on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and I’m trying to find more good blogs on load & performance testing. Lots of sources, but many of them aren’t posting very often. I’m trying to find a steady stream of good content. Dynatrace seems to really have the best and most active web performance blogging posts.

Then I came across MSDN blogs. Seemed like a great place to find posts about load testing. Ah…here it is, just what I was looking for: VSTS Load Test Team Blog.

I was recently reading an article on Yahoo entitled, “MS: No repeat of Xbox Live holiday meltdown (hopefully)”. What immediately struck me as interesting was the fact that Microsoft is still relying on hope to avoid another black eye with their customers.

Whenever you have a large scale database with multiple tables and numerous requests from users, building tables with perfect indexing can be the difference between great performance or angry users with time outs. Table indexing is often ignored while designing an application. It is usually left to the database administrators to pick up the pieces after an application is promoted and poor indexing causes performance issues. As a great developer, you can avoid the pitfalls of poor table indexing and create a tuned application even on the database backend.

Primary Keys


One of the biggest issues a database administrator deals with is the impending performance issues that seem to hit an expanding environment. Smaller businesses can usually handle the simple problems that may interrupt daily activities, but large or medium sized businesses need real solutions to quickly fix problems since performance issues equal lower revenue.

InformationWeek reported yesterday that Microsoft is coming out of the closet with their new “Cloud OS”. It is a version of Windows supposedly written from the ground up for this platform.

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 do not inherently support load balancing out of the box like most information technology experts might think. They have intrinsic tools that allow for scalability and load balancing, however, they do not have the defined load balancing functions that are commonly known among network administrators. Instead, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 comes with some tools to help with scalability and performance for your enterprise organization.

Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS)

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