Skip to main content

Tracing performance issues with Performance Monitor

Before you start installing big (and expensive) tools to trace performance issues, it's a good idea to first have a look at Performance Monitor a/k/a PerfMon. It's an amazing tool that goes far too often unused available freely on every windows machine. Through a lot of different performance counters you can monitor different aspects of your system. To open PerfMon, just go to the Start Menu, choose Run and type perfmon.

If you want to find out how the system is performing, then the following counter give you a good overview of general activity of the system.

  • Processor utilization
    • Processor\% Processor Time\_Total - how 'loaded' is the CPU at any given time. Don't confuse 100% processor utilization with a slow system though - processor queue length, mentioned above, is much better at determining this.
  • Memory utilization
    • Process\Working Set\_Total (or per specific process) - this basically shows how much memory is in the working set, or currently allocated RAM.
    • Memory\Available MBytes - amount of free RAM available to be used by new processes.
  • Disk Utilization
    • PhysicalDisk\Bytes/sec\_Total (or per process) - shows the number of bytes per second being written to or read from the disk.
  • Network Utilization
    • Network Interface\Bytes Total/Sec\nic name - Measures the number of bytes sent or received.

You can find  more info about the usage of the performance monitor and some other useful performance counters in this Windows perfmon- top 10 counters post.

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more