Perfmon Gone Wild

When diagnosing server performance problems, the first tool I turn to is the humble Task Manager. That's usually enough to get a rough idea of where we are in the bottleneck shell game: is it CPU, Disk, Network or Memory?


This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/08/perfmon-gone-wild.html

Thanks a lot for posting this! I’m in the process of testing an ASP.NET web app prior to deploying it onto a production server. It does seem like there’s an awful lot of available counters…it’d be nice to select a few pre-defined counter groups with a single click. Thanks again!

Great post title. Can’t wait for the DVD.

Once you set up your counter settings [scale, color, line thickness, etc.,] I recommend saving the settings. You can do this by right-clicking on the gray charting area and clicking “Save As…” web page. Next time you start PerfMon, simply drag this html file into the gray charting area and you’re ready to go. This will prevent the PerfMon gone wild scenerio above.

PerfMon rules!

I’m eager to take a look at Log Parser - I put together a similar application.

How do you submit a command from the logparser’s(2.2) command-line tool that will sql-ize the possibly plural network-interface-card(s) in order to take the average (per nic card). Normally production servers have two nic cards. I have tried the following:
logparser "SELECT AVG(\SERVERNAME\NETWORK INTERFACE(INTEL …)) FROM C:Perfmon\copyoflogfile.csv"
I am getting the following error,
Error: Syntax Error: sqlfunction-expr: no matching closing parenthesis
PLEASE HELP!