WINDOWS 1002000 PROFESSIONAL RESOURCE KIT [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Quick Guide to Monitoring Disks

Use this quick guide to view the topics and tasks related to monitoring disk performance in Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Professional.

Tune registry settings and work with disk alignment tools to achieve better disk I/O performance.

To improve the system's performance, users of Windows 2000 Professional who choose to deploy the NTFS file system might want to reconfigure some default settings when using this file system.

In addition, developers using Windows 2000 Professional can experiment with Diskpar.exe, a sample program on the Windows 2000 Resource Kit companion CD, for insight into Windows 2000 APIs that can be used to reduce performance loss due to disk misalignment on disks with large track sizes and alignment optimizations.

See "Configuring the Disk and File System for Performance" later in this chapter.

Review installed disk counters and activate LogicalDisk counters as needed.

Getting familiar with the PhysicalDisk counters that monitor the activity of physical disks including removable media drives is important for collecting the type of disk performance data that you want. You can use these counters to monitor disk space and efficiency, and to observe disk operations in detail. PhysicalDisk object counters are enabled on the operating system by default and appear in the Performance console user interface. If you want to obtain performance data on your logical volumes, use the diskperf command to enable the LogicalDisk performance counters. The LogicalDisk object counters do not appear in the user interface until enabled.

See "Working with Disk Counters" later in this chapter.

Establish a baseline for disk performance.

A performance baseline is the level of performance you can reliably expect during typical usage and workloads. When you have a baseline established, it becomes easier to identify when your system is experiencing performance problems, because counter levels are out of the baseline range.

See "Establishing a Baseline for Disk Usage" later in this chapter.

Analyze disk counter data that might suggest a disk bottleneck.

Specific disk counters provide data about disk paging activity, disk utilization, queuing of disk requests, and rates of throughput. Observing these counters helps you determine when a disk bottleneck is developing.

See "Investigating Disk Performance Problems" later in this chapter.

Tune or upgrade disk resources as needed to improve disk performance.

When you have determined the cause of a disk bottleneck, you can undertake steps to correct the problem by changing disk-system configuration, defragmenting disks, upgrading hardware, or other tuning methods.

See "Resolving Disk Bottlenecks" later in this chapter.

Users of Microsoft® Windows® 98 and Microsoft® Windows NT® Workstation 4.0 will notice a few changes in Microsoft® Windows® 2000 with respect to disk resources and utilization. The following list provides a brief summary of the changes in features for these operating systems.

Disk defragmentation capability is built into Windows 2000 Professional. This was previously available in Windows 98 but not in Windows NT Workstation 4.0.

Windows 2000 Professional updates the version of NTFS provided in Workstation NT 4.0. While continuing to support the FAT file system familiar from previous versions, Windows 2000 Professional adds the FAT32 file system format, available in Windows 98 and new to users of Windows NT Workstation 4.0.

Users of Windows NT Workstation 4.0 might notice a change in how the disk performance counters operate. The PhysicalDisk object counters are now enabled by default; however, the LogicalDisk counters are not and must be manually enabled if needed. The data provided by the PhysicalDisk and LogicalDisk objects is similar to data supplied by the File System items in Windows 98 and offers additional information.

Some performance counters related to disk and file system activity have changed from Windows NT Workstation 4.0. Windows 2000 Professional includes the new % Idle Time and Split IO/sec counters. In addition, the % Disk Time, % Disk Read Time, and % Disk Write Time have been modified to use a different counter type for greater precision. For file activity that can involve the disk subsystem, Windows 2000 Professional provides new Process object counters not available under Windows NT Workstation 4.0, such as IO Data Bytes/sec, IO Data Operations/sec, and so on.