WINDOWS 1002000 PROFESSIONAL RESOURCE KIT [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Overview of Processor Monitoring and Analysis

Uniprocessor monitoring and analysis involve many variables. The following steps summarize in-depth monitoring and analysis of processor activity.

Establish a baseline for processor performance that reflects your system's typical workload. Perform this step to characterize your system's workload and identify how applications use the system.

Examine overall processor usage by viewing processor queue length and processor utilization (also referred to as processor time). Perform this step to obtain an overview of how heavily your system uses its resources.

Examine activity that adds to the processing load, such as high rates of interrupts and context switches. Perform this step to determine the efficiency of your system.

Examine individual processes and their percentage of the overall processor time. Perform this step to learn about the processes on your system.

Examine the threads- the units of work that make up a process-for each individual process and each thread's processor usage. Perform this step to learn about thread utilization on the system.

Evaluate thread priorities and change them to see if this provides better performance. (Microsoft does not recommend this as a long-term solution, but suggests it for testing purposes.) Perform this step to learn how threads interact and to determine which threads are preempting other lower-priority threads.

Figure 29.1 illustrates the role of processor monitoring in overall system monitoring.

Figure 29.1 Role of Processor Monitoring in Overall Monitoring Sequence

Before you begin the monitoring process, become familiar with the counters designed to measure processor activity and the Windows 2000 Resource Kit tools that can give you more information about processor workload and performance. The following sections summarize these counters and tools.

Processor Counters

The System, Processor, Process, and Thread objects contain counters that provide useful information about the work of your processor. Examine the counters in Table 29.1 for details about computer processes.

Table 29.1 Processor Counters

NOTE

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Because System Monitor samples processor time, the values for processor time counters reported by the Processor, Process, and Thread objects might underestimate or overestimate the activity on your system that occurs before or after you collect the sample.

In addition to the preceding list of objects and counters, the Job Object and Job Object Details objects provide information about processor usage. These performance objects are installed by default for monitoring job object performance. The job object makes it possible for developers to manage groups of processes by their processor usage and other factors. For example, job objects make it possible for applications to restrict the amount of processor time a process consumes; this is called process throttling. Process throttling is useful in Web-based administration applications for limiting the amount of processor capacity a site uses over a defined interval, thus avoiding bottlenecks and freeing processor capacity for other tasks. You might also use the job object to manage sharing of CPU time among groups of jobs. In addition to supporting process throttling, job objects help developers control the active number of processes, process identifiers (IDs), priority classes, and processor affinity. For more information about creating applications by using the job object, see the Microsoft Platform Software Development Kit (SDK) link on the Web Resources page at http://windows.microsoft.com/windows2000/reskit/webresources. For a discussion of application support and job objects, see Getting Started in Windows 2000 Help.

Resource Kit Tools for Processor Monitoring

The Windows 2000 Resource Kit companion CD contains utilities to help you understand and experiment with processor performance. Table 29.2 lists these utilities.

Table 29.2 Performance Utilities