My favorite KB’s

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888732

The combination of physical RAM and pagefile is called Virtual Memory. Virtual Memory is managed by Virtual Memory Manager. Physical memory(RAM) can be accessed at expoentially high speed than disk. So everytime server has to move data between physical disk and Memory, disk will introduced significant delay. Excessive and consistent paging activity is called thrashing.

Pagefile could be set in several ways, if you let Windows let manage PageFile size, it will create pagefile size (PhysicalRAM+1) MB. This PageFile size is required to catch memory dump when server create DUMP. Create seperate pagefile on seperate partition to improve performance. Number of pagefile you can create is 16 and Maximum size is 4 GB. So totak 16 x 4 =64GB page file size can be created and OS treats this file as one file. When pagefile is distrubuted across volume, all volumes have same characteristic like speed,size.Pagefile size should be kept on dedicated drive if we are looking for optimizing it’s use. RAID0/RAID1 might be good option but RAID5 is not recommended. Paging is write operation and may not suite characteristic of RAID5. If Page file optimization is required try not to put on system drive. If you need to catch memory, you have no option but to create it on System drive. Make sure you put on same drive as C drive and not same volume but different drive. Set Minimum and Maximum page file size to be same to avoid any overhead for dynamically increasing page file size. Best practise to create page file is to format volume and create pagefile before placing any data on that volume, this ensures you get full contiguous space.Also to note first partition on physical disk is closer to tip of this disk, where disk speed is highest and performance is best. How do you decide if you need more ram based on pagefile. Check pagefile: %usage Max in perfmon, if the usage is more than 10% it is time to think.

File system cache

File system cache is area on physical memory (RAM) for dynamically store accessing recently data of IO Subsystem, which includes Disks,Network interface and Networks. More is this space less times IO subsystem is accessed considerably increasing performance.

Maximize data throughput for file sharing: is generally recommended for file server and servers above 2GB RAM

Maximize data throughput for network applications: is using for application server and one who have internal memory optimization techinques.

Maximum values are put down above. SQL and Exchange server Maximize data throughput for network applications should be selected. Since they manage their internal system cache.

In a pure iSCSI clustering environment, you must set the Cluster service to depend on all the following services:

• MSiSCSI

• Clusnet

• Netman

• Rpcss

• W32time

sc config clussvc depend= clusnet/netman/Rpcss/w32time/msiscsi

More information is available KB 883397

PS D:\PowerShell> Get-WmiObject -Class win32_operatingsystem | format-list caption,csdversion,CreationClassName

caption           : Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
csdversion        : Service Pack 2
CreationClassName : Win32_OperatingSystem

More information is available here