Analyzing Processor Activity
Analyzing Processor Activity |
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To monitor processor activity, log the counters of the System, Processor, Process, Thread, PhysicalDisk, and Memory counters for at least several days at an update interval ranging from 15 minutes to an hour. (Use much shorter intervals for bottleneck detection.) Include network counters such as Bytes Total/sec (on the Network Interface object) if you suspect that network traffic might be interrupting the processor too frequently. Because excessive demand on memory and disk resources can cause bottlenecks that appear to affect your processor's performance, also include disk and memory counters in your monitoring configuration to help you determine the true source of any processor bottleneck.
If any applications running on the computer have counters, use these counters to monitor their activity and monitor these values along with system counter values.
Track the values reported at various times of day—for example, while users are logging on or off, while backups are being done, and so forth. As you are monitoring values for these counters, you might see occasional spikes. Typically, you can exclude these from your baseline; the range of values that seem to appear consistently are the ones that constitute your baseline.
Note
Keep in mind application overhead and disk-space usage when you set your monitoring frequency. Frequent updating demands more work and more file storage capacity from your computer. In general, you should experiment with different update intervals to balance these considerations against the level of detail you require for your monitoring data. For more information about how to monitor performance, see Windows 2000 Professional Help.
The longer you log, the more accurate your baseline will be. Processor use might be a problem only at certain times of the day, week, or month, and you are likely to see patterns in your workload that are correlated with changes in processor activity if you log for a longer duration. You can even use the log service to schedule monitoring at critical times to determine whether your processor is operating efficiently. During these critical times, you might want to log over intervals as short as every two seconds to get an accurate picture of processor usage on your system. This will help you isolate those applications that heavily stress your processor for further investigation and monitoring.