performance
From the “you can’t make this stuff up department,” this 2003 gem from blogging O.G. John Dvorak: IDLE-TIME PROCESS. Once in a while the system will go into an idle mode, requiring from five minutes to half an hour to unwind. It’s weird, and I almost always
hardware
One of our best servers at work was inherited from a previous engagement for x64 testing: it’s a dual Opteron 250 with 8 gigabytes of RAM. Even after a year of service, those are still decent specs. And it has a nice upgrade path, too: the Tyan Thunder K8W
error codes
A recent Scott Hanselman post described a problem he had with Windows Defender: Defender was unable to update my signatures, instead throwing a COM-ish 0x8024402c. Others are getting Error 1609 and still others 0x80240022. This isn’t an isolated incident. The latest release candidate of Team Foundation Server also returns
.net
Here’s some excellent, concise advice on troubleshooting performance in managed code. It all starts with peanut butter, naturally: My last entry was some generic advice about how to do a good performance investigation. I think actually it’s too generic to be really useful – in fact I think it