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

Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C#

Ever find yourself mapping multiple string values to the same result? Being a C# developer for a long time, I sometimes forget that the C# has evolved so I still dare to chain case labels or reach for a dictionary. Of course with pattern matching this is no longer necessary. With pattern matching, you can express things inline, declaratively, and with zero repetition. A small example I was working on a small script that should invoke different actions depending on the environment. As our developers were using different variations for the same environment e.g.  "tst" alongside "test" , "prd" alongside "prod" .  We asked to streamline this a long time ago, but as these things happen, we still see variations in the wild. This brought me to the following code that is a perfect example for pattern matching: The or keyword here is a logical pattern combinator , not a boolean operator. It matches if either of the specified pattern...
Read more