A Perfectly Cromulent Website

Recently I ran into a problem with IE 8 at work. Yes, that can be a wide range of problems but I found something a bit more specific than that.

We recently implemented a Share Point site and I noticed when doing speed tests for uploads of large files through IE, the speeds were quite a bit slower then the upload speeds in Chrome and Firefox. I thought that this might be a problem being that most of our users are going to be accessing the site through IE 7 or IE 8. I did a lot of searching and couldn’t really find much of anything. Most articles are about either speeding up torrent downloads or disabling plugins and things of that sort to speed up your browsing speeds in IE.

Then I found this site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329781

This article talks about changing the “Socket Send Buffer Length” in the registry to give IE more buffer space to upload files. The article gives the following steps in order to resolve the slow upload issue (as always back the registry and be careful when editing the registry):

Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe)

Locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:Value name: SocketSendBufferLength
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Decimal
Value data: Buffer size that you want (in bytes)

Buffer Size Value Options

16-KB Buffer = 16384

24-KB Buffer = 24576

32-KB Buffer = 32768

40-KB Buffer = 40960

48-KB Buffer = 49152

56-KB Buffer = 57344

64-KB Buffer = 65536

Quit The Registry Editor

Reboot the computer or Log-Off and Log-In again

In these steps I found the sweet spot for my machines to be 40-KB. You can setup the higher buffer sizes  but I didn’t really see any benefit to the higher buffer sizes. This fix really did increase the upload speeds to be about the same as Firefox or Chrome.

Give it a try and see for yourself!

Recently, I have setup some systems on a 10G Network connecting to iSCSI solid state storage. This setup is REALLY fast but I have seen some problems with it recently. In fact, just the other day one of the systems became unresponsive and I saw the following error in the event log:

tcp/ip has detected high memory utilization and has terminated some existing connections to  maintain system stability.

Also in the event logs shortly after that I saw entries about the iSCSI initiator losing connection to the storage and other nasty messages of that sort. After searching around a bit I came to a couple of potential fixes for this problem:

1. Removing the Symantec Endpoint Firewall from this system, as this could be cause problems when inspecting every packet that comes across  that 10G port.
2. Disabling Memory Pressure Protection in Windows – article discussing this topic

Hopefully between the two this will solve the problem. I didn’t know that such a feature even existed in Windows. But basically this “feature” will start dropping packets if windows detects an attack on that port. I don’t really know what Microsoft considers an attack, but I am sure 10G of traffic across a port is something that might seem odd to the application.

You learn more and more!

This is really for my benefit, but the quick and easy way to detect and fix orphaned Microsoft SQL Server users:

1. Open a query in SQL Server and select the database you want to fix
2. Run the following command query analyzer: sp_change_users_login 'Report'
3. Create a list of the users that get reported back
4. Make sure the users exist on the new servers, if they do not be sure to create the users
5. Delete the command form query analyzer in step # 2
6. Run the following command in query analyzer, replace “UserName” with the user name you want fix: sp_change_users_login 'Auto_Fix', 'UserName'

Y0u can find a lot of articles going into lots of detail on how to fix this problem, but i know when I look it up I just want to see the command not why it does what it does. If you want a really good detailed article you can view this really good article.

Trying to create a new data-store in VMWare? Is it giving you errors that are not very specific? Does the error happen to be:

“Error during the configuration of the host failed to get disk partition information”

Well if this is the error you get, you might want to try the steps found in the following article.

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-1382

This post solved my data-store problems. The linux voodoo that this document had me perform created my data-store just like it needed to be created and even let me move my data over. This is quite a big improvement when I wasn’t able to do much of anything.

I found a great test for SQL Server and Storage alike. It uses SQLIO and runs a large variety of tests with different parameters to let you know which SQL Server setup would be optimal. I also like using it for storage as the wide range of tests shows you the potential of the storage.

Check it out at: SAN Performance Tuning