Windows IT Pro Magazine’s latest issue, the section “CTRL+ALT+DEL” – a section reserved for funny and odd message boxes that occasionally appear in software – features “Top 10 IT Admin Fears”.  Number 1 is “Fear of silence in the server room”.  Yes that is quite scary.  Number 5 is “Fear that the server running your […]

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Started having a problem with the generic error message “network cable unplugged” on several virtual machine guest OSs, running on Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2.  The problem happens infrequently, however, it is difficult to catch without cross-monitoring (one VM monitoring another VM for network connectivity). 
I don’t know why the problem is happening.  A search on […]

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In the first part of this series, two main areas that contribute to poor performance were discussed: hardware and software.  Part 2 will discuss other software that can contribute to poor performance.
It’s STILL a software problem
The structure, size, or location of HTML, images, JavaScript, CSS, etc., can make the difference between a page load time […]

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So you are monitoring your web application, but are you really covering the 3 basic levels that will fully ensure it is available and responsive?  Monitoring of a web application can be as simple as testing a single web page; however, going deeper and covering your bases is better.
 
Level 1: Monitor web server availability - […]

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Perhaps one of the more important aspects to setting up a monitoring solution is knowing where to monitor from. 
SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors that monitor from PoP (Points of Presence) around the world, offer a way to analyze performance from those locations.  This type of monitoring can be useful for websites that only have […]

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Most companies with Intranet web applications are concerned about uptime and performance for their internal users but fail to show it.  Since internal applications are typically supported by a very small staff, usually one person, let’s call him John, who also has other responsibilities, monitoring uptime is an often overlooked component because “if it goes […]

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As a long time user of Outlook, I have rarely had problems.  On my main machine (Windows XP SP2, with 2GB memory), I often discover through Task Manager that Outlook’s process outlook.exe is gobbling up huge amounts of memory which can affect my system’s performance. 
Half of the time, I simply ignore the fact that it […]

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The UK website http://www.vnunet.com/ is truly slow.  Maybe it is slow from my location in the USA, but some of the users on their forums have complained about the slowness of the site way back in 2006. 
There are plenty of external javascript sources which are probably slowing it down. 
Clicking on the “Forum” link at the top […]

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In HTML, one can reference a file that contains just javascript by using the javascript tag with the src attribute:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.server.com/myscript.js”></script>
This can have some benefits with regard to performance, except when the file is located on a different server that you have no control over.  Having more than one of these external javascript links […]

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Website performance is a reflection of the efficiency and credibility of your company or organization.  From the most technical power users to people just learning how the Internet works, a slow website is a slow website.
Sometimes the best way to avoid poor website performance is to create a checklist of things NOT to do.
First, here […]

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