Another MeasureUp question

bleScreened

You are the systems administrator for your company. The company's server computers are running Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

You are troubleshooting one of the company's application servers named AppServ2. AppServ2 is configured with the following hardware:

1.5 GHz processor
60 GB hard drive
128 MB of memory

Users run shared applications on AppServ2 from their client workstations. Some of these applications run continuously for weeks. As more applications are added to AppServ2, users experience slower performance with all of the applications. All applications have been tested and contain no memory leaks. Some of the applications are multi-threaded.

You use System Monitor to monitor AppServ2. You gather the data shown:

Memory pages/sec = 80
Processor % disk time = 100%
Disk avg. queue disk length = 10

You need to improve the performance of AppServ2.

What should you do first?

Add more memory to the computer.
Replace the processor with a faster one.
Upgrade the network adapter.
Add another hard disk.



All of these counters are way too high. An argument could be made to increase any and all components. What is the best answer if I found this on the exam? Are there any questions on the MS exam that are ambiguous like this? Or is the answer more obvious than I think it is?

Thanks!

dynamik

Add more memory. Too little memory = excessive paging = excessive disk usage.

Remember that these components to do function in isolation. Problems with one may negatively affect others as well.