Oh, speaking of Osborne.
I was googling a few facts and discovered he just passed away, my condolences to his family…
David E., all the modern wonderful advances are also going towards making software easier to write and manage, it’s not all about performance.
Am I misremembering things? I haven’t worked in the Windows world for several years, but I thought all this stuff was available in perfmon since the first version of NT?
Jeff, there is no top command in Unix. It’s a Linux command.
Oh crap, ignore the above comment.
Ayende Rahien (go ahead, google him) recently maintained that screen I/O, network I/O, and disk I/O are the main bottlenecks, the first being the surprising one. I’ve seen this, though: in python scripts I’ve written for solving Project Euler problems, it’s often the case that print statements take a large amount of the runtime. Strange but true.
bahh, Vista only.
(Btw, your captcha text is still ‘orange’)
‘perfmon’ is part of the MMC all the way back to the NT days. It is available in XP.
If you like numbers, give that one a shot. You can even set alerts for resource limits and set it up to log/send message/run program.
Wow, you dedicated an entire blog to a 1990 invention. MicroFanBoy syndrome is working overtime with all those lawsuits against free software now isn’t it?
Take your blinders off Jeff, the special gifts from Ballmer are getting to your head a bit much.
Maybe this is a silly question, but what’s w3wp.exe?
I’ve never seen this process, but TBH I’ve never administered a live public website.
Also, I thought the network detail section is per process and not per IP. Was it change or did I simply seriously miss out there?
Did you check that the IP you’re banning isn’t google’s spider or some such?
The CPU detail section gives you a moving average of CPU usage, which is much saner than Task Manager’s always shifting numbers.
If you are still using XP and hate the jumping process feature, enable the CPU Time column and sort by it. You can group all of the heavy CPU use processes together and get a good idea of what your system is doing over time.
Try I/O Read Bytes, I/O Write Bytes, and I/O Other Bytes (network) to see over time usage of hard drive and network resources. You can’t see the files that are being accessed but it will give you a little better picture of what is going on. If you see something posting massive read byte usage and it isn’t your virus scanner or search indexer, you need to figure out what it is asap.
The first thing I do on every new XP install is add Available MBytes to the default counters in Performance Monitor, and change the scale of Average Disk Queue Length. I then add perfmon to my startup folder under Start Menu/Programs. I generally have perfmon, taskman and Process Explorer open at all times, so when the pc does start slowing down, I can very quickly check what the bottleneck is. Filemon usually comes next, leading to my killing the offending process (often virus scan or SMS agent service).
I did my Master of Engineering thesis on performance monitoring and root-cause analysis, and I also enjoy this field. Its amazing how little even knowledgeable and experienced computer users know about how their computers work.
Thanks for a great blog Jeff, I’ve been reading it for years, though this is the first time I’ve commented.
Looking at your graphs, I would say you would utilize the memory a bit more.
You can try using some web accelerator like Squid. (http://www.squid-cache.org/)
See if it alleviates a bit of your Disk/CPU.
Great post.
Does anyone know of similar tools for other OSes?
Sam
This is great! I’ve been looking for something exactly like this…
Poor Jeff for having been limited to Process Explorer (and, cringe, task manager). As others have already mentioned, NT has had much better stats available for years, through perfmon. Try start-run, perfmon.msc 
Jeff,
you might be interested in this.
http://adminfoo.net/2007/04/windows-perfmon-top-ten-counters.html
I’m guessing from a previous post that you use My Yahoo! Checkout what they have done to that zoomed in and cropped picture of the walnut shell. Maybe I fail the ink blot test, but for a second I wondered if this was going to be NSFW…
Yes, i 'm addicted to performance-monitoring too. And yes, the vista-tool is great.