Evaluating Memory and Cache Usage
Evaluating Memory and Cache Usage |
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After you have observed memory usage under normal conditions and established your memory baseline, you might notice that the memory counters sometimes stray from the typical range. The following sections describe how to investigate conditions that cause memory values to deviate from the baseline.
The following activities help you to learn about and analyze memory usage and memory bottlenecks using System Monitor counters and other tools.
Table 6.2 summarizes the most important counters to monitor for analyzing memory usage.
Table 6.2 Counters for Analyzing Memory Usage
| To monitor for | Use this Object\Counter |
|---|---|
| Memory shortages | Memory\Available Bytes or Available KBytes (to see the amount in kilobytes) or Available MBytes (to see the amount in megabytes) Process (All_processes)\Working Set Memory\Pages/sec Memory\Cache Bytes |
| Frequent hard page faults | Memory\Pages/sec Process (All_processes) \Working Set Memory\Pages Input/sec Memory\Pages Output/sec |
| Excess paging with a disk bottleneck | Memory\Page Reads/sec Physical Disk\Avg. Disk Bytes/Read |
| Paging file fragmentation | PhysicalDisk\Split IOs\sec PhysicalDisk\% Disk Read Time PhysicalDisk\Current Disk Queue Length Process\Handle Count |
| Memory leaks; memory-intensive applications | Memory\Pool Nonpaged Allocations Memory\Pool Nonpaged Bytes Memory\Pool Paged Bytes Process(process_name)\Pool Nonpaged Bytes Process(process_name)\Handle Count Process(process_name)\Pool Paged Bytes Process(process_name)\Virtual Bytes Process(process_name)\Private Bytes |
| Cache Manager efficiency | Cache\Copy Read Hits % Cache\Copy Reads/sec Cache\Data Map Hits % Cache\Data Maps/sec Cache\MDL Read Hits % Cache\MDL Reads/sec Cache\Pin Read Hits % Cache\Pin Reads/sec To identify cache bottlenecks, also use Memory\Pages Input/sec with these counters. |
Important
The LogicalDisk object counters are not available by default. If you want to monitor the values for these counters, you must first activate the counters by typing diskperf – yv at the Windows command prompt.