Monitoring Production Servers
If you manage a Web farm of computers running Commerce Server 2002 Enterprise Edition, you can monitor system performance with Windows 2000 System Monitor or other similar tools to predict where bottlenecks may occur. You can effectively monitor your production servers by running calibration tests, updating usage profiles, and monitoring performance counters for Commerce Server.
Run Calibration Tests
Update Usage Profiles
Monitor Commerce Server Performance Counters
Run Calibration Tests
A Compaq RAID array, or similar disk subsystem has very different performance characteristics depending upon the actual hardware setup. As a best practice, you should calibrate the subsystem to determine the following elements:
- Maximum physical disk reads per second
- Maximum physical disk writes per second
- Maximum disk bytes per second
Modern disk subsystems have tiers of complexity. For single disk drives or simple SCSI solutions, the % Disk Time counter is an accurate reflection of the capacity of the physical disk. For more complex multi-disk configurations, the disk queue can grow to the number of active spindles in the array before any items are actually waiting to be transferred.
For the newest Low Voltage Differential (LVD) or Fibre Channel disk systems, the issues are more complex. For these high-end systems, you should observe performance and capacity with the tools the vendor supplies. In addition, there is a maximum bandwidth limit in the system bus of the server and the SCSI or Fibre Channel interface. The total disk throughput should be compared to these limitations.
Update Usage Profiles
The usage profile is a statistical model of an average user interaction and the maximum number of concurrent users that the site needs to support at its peak. An important part of site monitoring is to monitor users to determine if user behavior has changed. Watching growth trends in user activity is critical. More important, however, is to give this data to your developers, testers, and capacity planners so they can plan for future hardware and software requirements.
You use the User Profile Management performance counters to update and monitor user behavior.
Monitor Commerce Server Performance Counters
Review the list of Commerce Server performance counters. Begin by adding the counters from this list to the System Monitor. You can add other counters later.
See Also
Commerce Server Performance Counters
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