Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server

The whole Internet is full of more or less useful tips for performance tuning on windows server. Many tips to change some mystery registry settings are not only not useful, but the can cause serious problems on your servers. Some popular performance tricks in the Internet make only sense in older releases and are obsolete in newer versions of Windows Server. You should really carefully evaluate every tip before you implement it on your production servers.

But why trust on tips from the Internet when there are very good performance tuning guidelines from the creators of Windows Server like the

Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server (Windows 2008, 2008 R2, 2012)
Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2012 R2

This guides are packed with useful tips&tricks and detailed explanations how Windows server work and which settings should be applied in different scenarios like File, Application or Web servers. My recommendation is to not change any settings on your windows server before you have read and understood the above documents!