A brief description of what will be covered in this document follows.
Performance Benchmarks
This paper uses industry
benchmarks and capacity planning tools to demonstrate the performance capabilities of
Windows 2000. Most benchmarks represent a specific workload or Information Technology (IT) environment. Although good benchmarks
are designed to simulate real customer workloads, it is impossible for any
single benchmark to simulate every customer environment. However, benchmark results have long
been used to describe and compare the performance capabilities of competing
systems. Benchmark results are one of many criteria used by
IT professionals when determining which platform best fits their needs.
The various tools used for this paper, such as WebLoad and WebBench, can also
be used to test custom workloads. Because these benchmarks can be customized to
adapt to a specific customer environment and traffic pattern, these tools allow
customers to simulate and test the performance and capacity of their
environments more accurately.
Furthermore, this paper provides you with detailed information on how to
optimize Windows 2000 for certain workloads and benchmarks.
Tuning for Performance
For the most part, Windows 2000 is a "self-tuning" operating system. This
means that in most cases, Windows 2000 automatically adapts to perform
optimally "right out of the box" depending on the environment in which it’s
running—assuming that the hardware is properly configured. For instance, when
you deploy Windows 2000 as a Web server, other services that are also
present but not used are put into a state where they occupy very few system
resources such as CPU and memory. However, as with any operating system,
performance depends on many outside factors such as hardware, device drivers,
applications, workload, the network, and so forth. In addition, there are
certain practices and tuning guidelines that can be followed to optimize the
performance of Windows 2000 in certain environments. These parameters will
be discussed in detail throughout this paper.
Hardware
The selection of hardware is critical to ensuring maximum performance. If a
system contains a component that has not been optimized for the operating
system, performance is sure to suffer. For instance selecting a video card with
a poorly written video driver can result in poor performance and/or a poor
benchmark score on client computers. The same is true for other critical
components such as network adapters (sometimes called network interface cards or
NICs) and Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) controllers on a server.
Each section of this paper provides a generic hardware configuration for each
deployment scenario. We strongly recommend that you check with your hardware
supplier to ensure that the key components used in the system (video, disk
subsystem, RAID controller, network adapters, and so forth) have been optimized
for Windows 2000.
Performance Results
Each section of this paper includes a number of performance results presented
in chart form. Two different hardware configurations have been used to produce
these results:
