Quick Guide to Monitoring Processors
Use this quick guide to view the topics and tasks that you need to monitor your processor activity in Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Professional.
The Processor object counters report data about processor activity including processor use, requests queued for processor time, and more. It's important to understand the type of data these counters provide and what it tells you about processor performance.
See "Overview of Processor Monitoring and Analysis"later in this chapter.
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 Processor Performance" later in this chapter.
Typically a queue of several waiting processor requests combined with a high CPU utilization rate signals a processor bottleneck. Observing counters that report this data is important for detecting bottlenecks that might be reducing your system's ability to handle its workload.
See "Recognizing a Processor Bottleneck" later in this chapter.
See "Processes in a Bottleneck" later in this chapter.
See "Threads in a Bottleneck" later in this chapter.
The operating system is designed to schedule threads to run in an optimal fashion so that the user need not intervene to manually adjust thread scheduling by changing thread priority. However, if you find that certain threads are seldom able to run due to the activity of other threads, you can adjust the thread's priority in order to allow them to run. Doing so does not provide a long-term solution to a thread bottleneck but is a useful illustration of the effect of thread priority on thread activity.
See "Advanced Topic: Changing Thread Priority to Improve Performance" later in this chapter.
Users of Microsoft® Windows® 98 and Microsoft® Windows NT® 4.0 Workstation might notice a few changes in Windows 2000 with respect to processor resources and use. The following list provides a brief summary of the changes in features for these operating systems.
Dual processor support Unlike Windows 98, which was uniprocessor-based, Windows 2000 Professional supports dual processors.
Optimal responsiveness for applications Windows 2000 Professional's default configuration provides optimal responsiveness for applications. By default, it defines short, variable quanta for applications and gives a foreground application a priority boost. This is different from Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, which does not boost priority of the foreground application but only assigns a longer time slice (quantum) to the foreground thread. You can configure the setting by using System properties on both Windows NT Workstation and Windows 2000 Professional. Windows 98 does not provide a capability for configuring system responsiveness.
Changes in counters In System Monitor under Windows 2000 Professional, the % Total Processor Time, % Total Privileged Time, % Total User Time, and Total Interrupts/sec counters have been removed from the System object. You now need to use the _Total instance with the % Processor Time, % Privileged Time, % User Time, or Interrupts/sec counters of the Processor object to collect similar data. In contrast, the System object in Performance Monitor (Windows NT 4.0 Workstation) provided counters for total processing time, total user time, total privileged time, and the total number of interrupts per second. Windows 2000 Professional also adds a new counter (Creating Process ID) to the Process object for identifying processes that open other processes, in addition to providing the new Job Object and Job Object Details objects. In Windows 98 System Monitor, the Kernel: Processor Usage (%) reports the amount of time that the processor is busy; the tool provides no other processor-specific items.