70-292 Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment for a W2K MCSA Mock Test Exam

Demo Question 20.

You work as the network administrator at EliteCertify.com. The EliteCertify.com network consists of a single Active Directory domain named EliteCertify.com. All servers on the EliteCertify.com network run Windows Server 2003 and all client computers run Windows XP Professional. A member server named EliteCertify -SR14 is an application server on your network. You are assigned to monitor the performance of EliteCertify -SR14. An application hosted on EliteCertify -SR14 is used during the day, by users working in the Sales department. You installed the application last week, but since then you have had to restart EliteCertify -SR14 on numerous occasions. You want to monitor the server to determine whether there is an existing memory bottleneck. You open System Monitor to view performance data collected on EliteCertify -SR14. The exhibit shows the performance object counter values over the past few weeks. What should you do to improve the performance of EliteCertify -SR14?

A. Add an additional CPU.
B. Add additional RAM.
C. Replace your network adapter with a faster network adapter.
D. Replace your hard disk with a faster one.
E. Schedule your application to run during off peak hours.


Display Answer

Answer: B

Explanation: The Memory: Pages/sec counter indicates the rate at which pages are written to disk, or read from disk. With a recommended counter threshold of 20 or below 30, depending on your computer; a high value such as 80 is indicative of insufficient RAM, memory bottlenecks or memory leaks. The Memory: Page Faults/sec counter would give you an idea of the rate at which page faults are occurring. An acceptable counter value for Memory: Page Faults/sec is 150, providing you have a fairly new computer. The exhibit shows the value of the Memory: Page Faults/sec counter as 500. Both counters indicate the need for more RAM on EliteCertify -SR14. Supplementing your RAM supply would improve the performance of EliteCertify -SR14. Users should be able to run the new application on your application server with no issues. Incorrect answers: A. The Processor: % Processor Time counter should be tracked if you want to detect a process which is utilizing over 85 percent of the processor time. In this case, the current value of the % Processor counter does not indicate a processor issue. An average over 85% would indicate a CPU bottleneck. C. The majority of Ethernet networks run at 100Mbps or below. D. ThePhysical Disk: % Disk Time counter indicates the percentage of time that a drive is active, and has a threshold of 85 percent. In your case, while the counter is fairly high at 85%, only two requests are in the queue. This is quite acceptable for a single hard disk. E. There is no need to schedule the application to run at night. Users need to run the application during the day, which can be made possible by simply adding more RAM to your server.