No, to function properly the Performance Sentry collection service should be set up to run under the LocalSystem (or SYSTEM) account. The LocalSystem (or SYSTEM) account is a built-in account used by many services with an extraordinary level of privileges for accessing local system resources. These include privileges that cannot be granted to any User […]
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What is the format of the Performance Sentry data files?
Performance Sentry data files are ASCII text files, comma delimited by default, in an open, documented format that can be easily read in almost any application. To make it easy for third party products to process our data, we developed a self-defining file format. At the start of each file, we write Configuration records and […]
How big are the nightly Performance Sentry data files?
You can expect data files on the order of 8-12MB daily. If you find that your daily .smf data files are significantly larger and that amount of data is causing unacceptable problems and delays in post-processing, there are several approaches that you can use to trim them back in size without sacrificing clarity and detail. Review […]
What is the overhead of running Performance Sentry?
At typical collection intervals (we recommend at least once per minute), Performance Sentry overhead is well under 1% of a single processor. Chapter One of the User’s Manual contains a lengthy discussion of Windows Server performance monitoring overhead considerations.
How is running Performance Sentry different from Microsoft’s Perfmon or the Windows System Monitor?
Performance Sentry and the Performance Monitor (Perfmon) or System Monitor all access the same performance data and all access it the same way. This performance data encompasses an enormously rich set of metrics on resource usage of key hardware and software components that is available on every Windows server and workstation. We think this is […]
What is Performance Sentry and how does it relate to NTSMF?
Performance Sentry was originally created as NTSMF. Demand Technology Software was founded in the early days of Windows NT by mainframe performance analysis and capacity planning professionals. They recognized the need for capturing performance metrics on Windows NT in a fashion similar to the mainframe software called SMF (System Management Facility). Thus, Windows NT SMF […]
How do I find a memory leak?
A memory leak refers to a programming bug where an application program repeatedly allocates virtual memory, but never deletes it. Eventually, a program with a memory leak will cause something bad to happen. For example, the system or some of its applications might lock up because all the available virtual memory is allocated. Several aspects […]
How can I tell how much RAM is being used by application processes and various operating system functions?
It is not possible to get a complete accounting of RAM usage on a Windows, but you can get reasonably close. RAM usage by various OS functions is measured by the following five Memory Object counters: Pool Nonpaged Bytes: these represent allocations directed to the nonpaged pool, which is a set virtual memory pages that […]
I see a lot page faults on my system even though there appear to be plenty of Available Bytes. What is going on?
You are probably looking at the Page Faults/sec Counter and interpreting it as the rate of demand paging. Not entirely. In Windows Server, the Page Faults/sec counter includes both hard and soft page faults. (It also appears to include Cache faults/sec, which are application-related file cache read misses.) Instead of using the Page Faults/sec counter […]
How should I report on processor utilization for machines running Intel Hyper-threading (HT) technology?
Hyper-threading (HT) is the brand name for the technology Intel uses in many of its Xeon 32-bit processors that enables one physical processor core to execute two instruction streams (or threads) concurrently. On an HT machine, when HT is enabled, each physical processor currently presents two “logical” CPU interfaces to the operating system so that […]
