Mike McIntyre's Blog

Troubleshooting MOSS/WSS Performance Issues

2009-08-18T19:23:00Z

One of the things that I find myself doing more and more of is troubleshooting performance related issues for SharePoint. We’re at the point in the lifecycle of the product where people have it installed, it’s working (for the most part) and they want it to crawl/search/render faster. Performance issues, by their very nature, are not (typically) resolved quickly . The process usually involves the gathering of large amounts of disparate data, correlating it, and looking for patterns and anomalies....(read more)

Analyzing IIS Log files using Log Parser – Part 1

2009-07-21T06:07:00Z

Working with SharePoint, I often find myself in situation where I need to analyze IIS log files in a variety of ways to understand what kind of load is being placed on the system. In an effort to make this easier for me, and others, I have tried to automate, script, etc., wherever possible. The first pass that I typically run on the IIS data is to slice the IIS traffic by hour. IIS Logs files record their time in UTC ; however, most people live/operate in a different time zone. In order to make the...(read more)

Mine the ULS logs for query latency - Redux

2009-06-09T23:37:00Z

I was reading a blog posting from Dan Blood, Sr. Test Engineer at Microsoft, on how to mine the ULS logs for query latency . If you haven’t read the post yet, I encourage you to do so. It has a wealth of information in it. I was recently working a similar issue where I needed to do this exact thing and I discovered a couple of improvements that I’d like to share on the process that Dan has put together. I think it will help simplify. When running Dan’s script against a sizeable amount of ULS data,...(read more)

How to quickly compare file version information across your MOSS farm

2009-06-09T19:27:00Z

6/1/2009, 5:10 PM I often find myself in a situation where I need to quickly compare multiple servers to determine if the same version of the product has been installed on all machines. The easiest way to do this, at least for me, involves: SPSReport ( http://www.codeplex.com/spsreport ) Log Parser ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&displaylang=en ) Excel pivot table First, you want to obtain an SPSReport (LITE) from all of the servers...(read more)

Enumerating items counts in lists

2008-12-01T17:34:00Z

Recently, we found ourselves in a situation where we suspected that the customer had exceeded our capacity planning guidelines for the number of items in a document library; however, how do we go about verifying that? Well, the steps below will walk you through how to enumerate the counts for the different folders. You have the ability to set a threshold value and report on everything that exceeds that threshold. Enjoy! Connect to the SQL server via Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SQL 2005)...(read more)

Hotfix for Advanced Search issue in MOSS (950437)

2008-09-29T16:04:00Z

Apparently , some detail was accidentally omitted from the KB article - Expensive Transact-SQL queries are generated in the back-end instance of SQL Server when you perform a search in SharePoint Server 2007 ( http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=950437 ) Advanced search queries issue very expensive SQL queries like “filename LIKE ‘%health%’” when we try to query with contains restrictions against individual properties. Depending upon the complexity of the query and the size of the corpus, the resulting...(read more)

What was I thinking?

2008-09-02T22:03:00Z

Have you ever written an email and clicked the send button only to wish you had given it just another minute or two of thought? Of course, you can always attempt to do a message recall; however, if your recipient has rules turned on to route your messages, they're going to get it anyway. Also, if you're sending to clients who do not honor that request, you're going to be out of luck. So, how can I configure Outlook to save me from myself? From the Outlook menu bar, choose Tools | Options. You should...(read more)

How can you download a hotfix without contacting Microsoft?

2008-09-02T21:25:00Z

A customer can get the fix they want without calling in to Microsoft, assuming they know the KB number of the hotfix they want and can remember the URL format for a self-service hotfix request: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=KBNumber&kbln=KBLanguage Let's use our August Cumulative Update (CU) for MOSS as an example. Navigate to the to the update. In this instance, the August CU for MOSS 2007 Global is KB 956056. This yields the following URL: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=956056&kbln=en-us...(read more)

Microsoft releases Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007!

2007-02-16T20:20:46Z

Well, Microsoft has finally released their first pass at a Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007! The BPA is based upon the same engine that Exchange has been using for a couple of years. Here is a small overview. Overview The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System Best Practices Analyzer programmatically collects settings and values from data repositories such as MS SQL, registry, metabase and performance monitor....(read more)

SPSReport has moved (yet again)

2006-10-31T06:08:00Z

Well, SPSReport has moved yet again! It is now, hopefully, in its final resting place. You can find the current version at http://www.codeplex.com/spsreport ....(read more)