Bottleneck - Processor, Memory, Disk, Network

http://adminfoo.net/2007/04/windows-perfmon-top-ten-counters.html

windows perfmon top ten counters

 

Bottleneck analysis

The most common use of PerfMon is to answer the burning question: why is my system running slow?

With the five performance counters listed below, you can quickly get an overall impression of how healthy a system is - and where the problems are, if they exist. The idea here is to pick counters that will be at low or zero values when the system is healthy, and at high values when something is overloaded. A 'perfectly healthy' system would show all counters flatlined at zero. (Perfection is unattainable, so you'll probably never see all of these counters flatlined at zero in real life. The CPU will almost always have a few items in queue.)

• Processor utilization
  • System/Processor Queue Length - number of threads queued and waiting for time on the CPU. Divide this by the number of CPUs in the system. If the answer is less than 10, the system is most likely running well.
• Memory utilization
  • Memory/Pages Input/Sec - The best indicator of whether you are memory-bound, this counter shows the rate at which pages are read from disk to resolve hard page faults. In other words, the number of times the system was forced to retreive something from disk that should have been in RAM. Occasional spikes are fine, but this should generally flatline at zero.
• Disk Utilization
  • PhysicalDisk/Current Disk Queue Length/driveletter - this is probably the single most valuable counter to watch. It shows how many read or write requests are waiting to execute to the disk. For single disks, it should idle at 2-3 or lower, with occasional spikes being okay. For RAID arrays, divide by the number of active spindles in the array; again try for 2-3 or lower. Because a shortage of RAM will tend to beat on the disk, look closely at the Memory/Pages Input/Sec counter if disk queue lengths are high.
• Network Utilization
  • Network Interface/Output Queue Length/nic name - is the number of packets in queue waiting to be sent. If there is a sustained average of more than two packets in queue, you should be looking to resolve a network bottleneck.
  • Network Interface/Packets Received Errors/nic name - packet errors that kept the TCP/IP stack from delivering packets to higher layers. This value should stay low.