Archive for Windows Performance

Windows Performance and Capacity Planning Challenges in Virtualized Environments

Mark Friedman, Founder and CTO of Demand Technology Software, recently presented two sessions at the Computer Measurement Group’s imPACt Conference covering Performance Management in the Virtual Data Center.  Mark discussed the current set of Windows performance and capacity planning challenges that arise due to infrastructure virtualization in both large scale on-premises and cloud computing environments. You can view […]

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How does the Performance Sentry collection service work?

The Performance Sentry collection service gathers performance Objects and Counters from the Windows Server operating system and writes them to the NTSMF collection file. Using Performance Sentry, you can collect any of the performance Objects that are available on your machine, including performance statistics on resource usage, networking, and application performance. In addition, Performance Sentry […]

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What is the minimum sampling period for Performance Sentry?

The minimum collection interval for Performance Sentry and NTSMF is 1 second. However, in most cases collecting at a 1 second interval may not be practical. For customers who do require less than 60 second sample intervals we recommend that they pare their data collection sets down to the absolute minimum number of counters for […]

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“Have you ever wondered how to determine the logical disk size looking at Performance Monitor performance metrics?”

It is easy, but requires some calculation. First, look at the logical disk object and add the ‘’% Free Space” and “Free Megabytes” counters to the Perfmon display. Then switch to ‘Report View’. Figure 1. Figure 1. Simply divide Free Megabytes by Free Space (remember this is a percentage, so the displayed value must be […]

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What is the meaning of the message “Insufficient data in performance name table” in the NTSMF.LOG File?

Sometimes the following message is displayed in the “.Log” file: 04/14/08-13:44:04 – Event ID: 2900, Category: Perf Text, Severity: Error Insufficient data in performance name table or 05/17/16-00:00:05 – Event ID: 2902, Category: Perf Text, Severity: Warning Name table located at \windows\system32\perfc009.dat. The following areas of the name table could not be interpreted which could […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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