Analyzing Processor Activity

Processes in a Bottleneck

After you have identified a processor bottleneck, you next need to determine whether a single process is using the processor or whether the processor is being consumed by running many processes. To do this, log processor time used by each process running on your computer, as follows:

Select the Process object.
Select the % Processor Time counter.
Select each process instance.

Important

All processes that are running will appear in the Instance box listed by the name of the associated executable program (for example, Windows Explorer appears as "explorer" in the Instance box). Note that if you are running multiple instances of the same executable program, System Monitor lists these under the identical name; thus, you will need to track these by their process identifiers. You can find the process identifier by using the Process\Process ID counter or by adding the PID column in Task Manager. For more information, see "Threads in a Bottleneck" later in this chapter.

For more information about MS-DOS-based (shown as NTVDM for Windows NT Virtual DOS Machine) and Win16-based processes that appear differently in the user interface. See "Overview of Performance Monitoring" in this book.