Monitoring Windows XP Performance

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Monitoring Windows XP Performance

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Monitoring the performance of a computer is essential to know how the computer is operating. The Windows XP operating system provides two main tools to monitor the performance of a computer and troubleshoot the performance-related problems. These tools are Task Manager and the Performance tool. Task Manager displays a real-time view of certain performance events. It provides information about the applications and processes that are currently running on a computer and enables a user to start, end, or run applications or system processes. From Task Manager, a user can quickly view the current usage of the CPU, memory, and network resources by the currently running processes.

A user can start Task Manager in the following ways:

• By right-clicking any open area on the Windows taskbar and selecting Task Manager.


• By pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ESC


• By pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL

When a user performs any of the above actions, the following window opens.



The Applications tab page of the Windows Task Manager window displays the status of the programs or applications that are currently running on the computer.

When a user clicks the Processes button, he can view the information about the currently running processes, their users, as well as the CPU and memory usage by the processes. He can also end any process by clicking the End Process button as shown in the image below:



The Performance tab page of the Windows Task Manager window, as shown in the below image, graphically displays the various aspects of a computer's performance such as CPU Usage, CPU Usage History, PF Usage, Page File Usage History, and information about total physical memory as well as kernel memory, etc.



CPU Usage: This section graphically indicates the percentage of processor cycles that are active at a moment. By analyzing the graph, a user can know the status of the processor. If the graph displays a high percentage continuously over 80% (even under normal conditions), then it indicates that the processor is overloaded and needs to be upgraded.

Page File Usage (PF Usage):

Whenever a computer is running with insufficient RAM and urgently needs more random access memory, the operating system uses a portion of the computer's secondary memory (hard disk space) to act as a primary memory (RAM). This memory is called the virtual memory and is also called the paging file (swap file). It is a hidden file on the hard disk that is used by the operating system to store parts of programs and data files that cannot be placed in the RAM due to unavailability of space. The operating system moves data between the paging file and the memory for creating free space for new data.

The Page File Usage section displays the percentage of the paging file that is being currently used by the operating system. If the paging file being used is continuously near 100%, then it is urgently needed to increase the size of the current paging file (if sufficient hard disk space is available). Increasing the size of the paging file improves the computer's performance.

CPU Usage History: This section indicates the involvement of the processor in a graphical manner after Task Manager is opened. A user can increase or decrease the refreshing rate by choosing High or Low under View > Update Speed.

Page File Usage History: This section graphically displays the usage of the paging file.

Besides these four graphs, the Performance tab page also displays the following sections:

Totals: This section displays the total number of processes, threads, and handles that are currently running on the computer. A single executable program is called a process and a thread is defined as an object within a process that executes instructions of the program. A handle that is also a part of a process represents a specific input/output instance. A process consists of multiple threads and each thread may have multiple handles.

Commit Charge (K): This section indicates the memory that is currently dedicated to running processes.

Physical Memory (K): This section displays information about the total available physical memory (RAM).

Kernel Memory (K): This section indicates the memory that is being consumed by the operating system. There are two types of kernel memory, namely paged and nonpaged. Paged kernel memory is only used by the system processes and nonpaged kernel memory can also be used by the applications, if required.

The Networking tab page of the Windows Task Manager window displays the current network utilization, its status, and link speed information for each enabled network adapter. The users can use this information to determine the blockage in the network connectivity.

Although Task Manager provides valuable information about the various performance measures, one can use a more sophisticated performance-monitoring tool called the Performance tool to obtain more detailed information about the computer's performance. The information in the Performance tool is classified in the following ways:

Object: An object represents a system component of a computer such as physical disks, memory, and processor etc.

Instance: An instance is each occurrence of an object. For example, if there are two hard disks on a computer, each disk is represented as an independent instance.

Counter: A counter is a particular measurable aspect of an object. There might be several measurable aspects of an object. For example, some of the counters for the physical disk can be
as follows:

• Disk Reads Per Second


• Average Disk Bytes Per Second


• Average Disk Queue Length

The Performance tool, which is displayed below, can be opened by running Performance from Start menu > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Performance.



By default, the Performance tool displays three counters:

• Pages/sec: This counter represents the rate at which pages are read from or written to disk during virtual memory operation. If this counter continuously displays a high value, it can be inferred that the computer is short of the memory.


• Avg. Disk Queue Length: This counter represents the average number of I/O requests queued. If this counter constantly displays a value more than zero, it can be inferred that there is not enough memory on the computer or the disk system is slow.


• % Processor Time: This counter displays the percentage of elapsed time spent by the processor in executing active tasks. If this counter shows a value that is greater than 80 percent, it indicates that the processor is overloaded and is slowing down the computer.

By analyzing these three counters, a user can observe the performance of the computer. In addition to these counters, there are hundreds of more counters available in the Performance tool and a user can add those counters to the Performance tool and view their corresponding values.

Performance Logs and Alerts:



This utility allows a user to log counter information to a file and to trigger alerts based on configured events. As shown in the above image, this tool contains three subsections: Counter Logs, Trace Logs, and Alerts. These are used for logging the activities for selected counters. The Performance tool can be configured in such a way that it will notify users or administrators whenever the defined criterion for a counter is exceeded. The Performance tool allows users to detect the memory-related problems by observing and evaluating a large number of important counters such as file system cache, paging file, physical memory, system cache counters, etc.

In addition to this, the Performance tool also allows users to detect the bottlenecks of the processor.

The following table contains several processor-related counters and their descriptions:

Object	Counter	Description
Processor	%Processor Time	As a primary indicator of processor's activity, this counter shows the time (in %) the processor consumes in processing a nonidle thread.
Processor	Interrupts/sec	This counter displays the average rate of handling interrupt requests generated by applications and hardware devices.
System	Context switches	This counter displays the rate of processor-switching from one thread to another.
Process	%Processor Time	This counter displays the processor time (in %) that are used by all threads of a distinct process.

In order to monitor and effectively manage a hard disk, the Performance tool provides several disk-specific counters that are related to the logical as well as physical disk.

The following is the description of some of the counters:

Disk Bytes/sec: This counter refers to the bytes' transfer rate. A high transfer rate indicates that the performance of the disk is good. A higher the transfer rate, the better will be the performance of the disk.

%Disk Time: This counter refers to the percentage of time the disk is busy in servicing read or write requests. If this value is greater than 50, then it indicates that the disk is overloaded.

In addition to these, there are many more counters corresponding to the different objects, which are very useful in measuring and maintaining the overall performance of a computer. In the end, we can conclude that with the Performance tool, Windows XP has made it much easier for us to monitor and manage the performance of a computer.

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