Windows NT also provides counters that can help you analyze processor usage, but many of these counters are more useful to a developer than to an administrator. The counters described here are relevant to bottleneck analysis.
| Object | Counter |
| System | % Total Processor Time |
| Process | % Processor Time |
If you observe processor utilization at a fine granularity (for example every one or five seconds), note that the counters fluctuate rapidly and frequently hit 100 percent for short periods of time. For this reason, monitoring processor use is more useful when the saturation points are averaged over a longer period of time. If you find that the processor usage reaches 100 percent and remains at that level for minutes or hours, your users are probably becoming impatient with response times. You might want to size your system for around 60 percent or 70 percent processor utilization during peak times, so that there is extra room for unexpected demands and for growth.
When you are running other services in addition to Microsoft Exchange Server on the server computer, it is recommended that you analyze per-process processor usage. This enables you to determine what services are using most of the CPU time and how to appropriately balance the load.
If the processor is your bottleneck, consider taking the following actions.
Summary of Recommendations