The short answer is that Intel knows what these things means, but does not publish a mapping anywhere of how these internal names correspond to external products. The closest Intel comes is this document at http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/mature/mature.pdf, which does not mention either Family or Stepping names. In semiconductor fabrication, “stepping” refers to the chip manufacturing process […]
Tag Archives for Windows Performance
Can I use the published clock speed in MHZ of the processor reliably as a relative speed rating?
For back-of-the-envelop capacity planning, it is nice to have a relative speed rating for various processors. You would like to be able to say with confidence that a given processor-bound workload running on machine A running at 400 MHz will execute in 1/3 the time on processor B running at 1.2 GHz that is 3 […]
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 […]
What sort of CPU capture ratios can I expect on my Windows machine?
Pretty good ones for the most part, unless you encounter one of several possible problems. Capture ratios deal with the difference between the theory and practice of computer performance monitoring. In theory, since Windows derives all the CPU time measurements from the same data collection mechanism, the following relationship should hold: S Thread(_Total) % Processor […]
What is the most reliable indicator of CPU contention?
Look at a combination of processor utilization and processor queuing. (1) The primary indicator of processor utilization is the % Processor Time Counter in the Processor Object. Note that the _Total instance of the Processor Object is actually the average value over all processors. The System Object in NT 4.0 contains a Counter named % […]
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From the Blog
- Windows Performance and Capacity Planning Challenges in Virtualized Environments
- Defining and Using Machine Groups in the Performance Sentry PDB
- Microsoft’s Hyper-V Performance — Introduction
- Performance Sentry Cumulative Maintenance Released
- Demand Technology Software Announces v2.4 of the Performance Sentry Web Portal
- Performance Sentry VM 2.0 now available
- Performance Sentry supports Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1
- New Performance Objects in Windows 8 and Server 2012
- MXG and Performance Sentry for Cost Effective Windows Performance Monitoring
- Performance Sentry supports Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
- Performance Sentry Performance Database (PDB) Data Model
