Tune up your old SurfacePro4

I have a Surface Pro4 for a while. And it got every half year its nice fine upgrade. 

Since beginning the Surface Pro4 supported 2 external full HD monitors via the dock but then the internal screen was blacking out. Checked the specs and it was as it was by design. The gaphic adapter did not support 3 monitors (while external are full HD 1080 and the internal was in native 2k mode)

In October I realized that after a certain update (could not found which one) the WLAN becomes also very clunky (bad WLAN performance). Sometimes packet loss or ping roundtrip times in the 900ms or more milliseconds. Did here also some research and all hints just improved from time to time so no real solution.

So what is the best advice when in trouble?

1. Reboot
2. Reinstall
3. Rebuy newer hardware

Then I thought ok its now worth to reinstall my machine completely fresh from ground. (2. Reinstall option). Due to Onedrive not really a big data loss. Just the hazzle of reinstalling latest version of my software suites.

And it turned out it was a refreshing living cell injection for my PC!

After processing all the updates the machine is supporting things out of the box I had never before automatically.

1. It now supports 2 external screens while still having native resolution shown on the internal screen (= 1 screen more!)
2. The bad WLAN performance was gone
3. It supports now out of the box space reservation for upgrades (fresh installed systems since 1903 (afaik) will create a extra free space reserved for future upgrades. So no showblocker for upgrades anymore with HDDs full of data. This only works with fresh installed machines beginning with 1903. So migrations from 1507 over and over again do not support this)
4. My important user profile documents are automatically migrated to Onedrive out of the box! So everything you store them will integrate automatically to Onedrive. Just be aware of your picture archive. It automatically syncs down and blows your HDD. So you should keep it "cloud only" with the Files On Demand feature!!!)

All over my advice is from time to time it is still worth to take a fresh restart! (Ensuring that all your precious data is stored in OneDrive)

Bad web server performance in Azure - dont forget the right view for diagnostics

Recently I had an issue with bad performance of a webservice in Azure.

First look you typically take is to check the main metrics for the webservice like CPU and RAM. But CPU was always around 10%-15% and RAM was around 60% - 70%. So no big deal.

But the time to answer requests was very bad. (Left side without modification. Right side with modification).

Then I checked the database and it looked fine on the first place. When you see this you would never mind that this is still an issue! But when you look deeper into it you will find that Azure starts to show this with aggregation type  "AVG"= Average values. (You will find the dropdown in the right upper corner of the graph) So what you see is just a cummulation over time. And this can be really misleading!  (Left side still the bad situation before modification, right side with modification)

After changing the aggregation to the aggregation type "MAX" you will see this. And this makes really much more sense now. So in my situation very often the SQL server in Azure hits its limits. But not for a long time as my requests are from hundreds of users but not permanently.  (Left side still the bad situation before modification, right side with modification)

But now the big question - how to fix this?

The cool thing in Azure is that nearly all ressources scale in the one or other way. And the scaling is incredible. In my situation I have initially operated the website with the smallest production SQL server instance in Azure with 10 DTUs. (For DTU definition checkout here).

To finally improve my website application performance the simple change was from 10 DTU to 20 DTU (in S1 Standard Tier). This cost me actually 12€ more per month and all users are happy again.

To do this simply move the slider in the "Configure" section of your Azure DB.

And thats it!