In article , "Tim" wrote:

In XP, Perfmon is in Administrative tools in the control panel. By default
when you open it, it displays the following 3 metrics (aka counters):

% Processor Time
Avg.Disk Queue Length
Pages/sec

The first is the traditional CPU use graph. The Disk Queue length is not a
lot of use to people with one IDE or SATA disk drive that does not support
TCQ or NCQ and are not running multithreading server style systems - it
indicates how busy the disc subsystem is (IDE systems will rarely get much
of a queue as they don't have a supported queueing system...). The third
metric is a measure of the number of memory page references where the page
was not in memory. It indicates memory overloading / virtual memory use. On
a system with adequate memory this should be zero or close to most of the
time.

If you right click on any of the metrics shown at the bottom of Perfmon, you
can select properties where you can change the scale of the displayed
metrics, colour and line style and many other things. If you add a metric
that is off the scale immediately (EG disc read bytes / second) then you can
adjust the scale to fit the screen and / or you could adjust the extent of
the Y axis (EG make it 0 - 200 instead of the default 0 to 100).

The Yellow light bulb on the toolbar is handy - click and it will highlight
the graph line for the counter (metric) you have selected at the bottom.

To add a counter, click the + sign. There is a lot to learn here. A real
lot. To add "interrupts" click +, in the Performance Object drop list select
"Processor", then in the Select counters list, scroll to the bottom and
select Interrupts / sec and click Add.

Note that there is an Explain button which will show a brief and technical
explanantion of the metric. If you need more help on these metrics then I
suggest going to http://support.microsoft.com/ or http://msdn.microsoft.com/
and doing a search or try google.

On my system, if I add Interrupts / Second, the average reading comes up at
around 1300 per second (the system is quite idle). Obvisouly I will not see
a meaningful graph like this unless it is scaled appropriately - it is
scaled to 0.01 which results in a usable graph hovering around the "13"
mark.

Often the output displayed by a tool like Perfmon won't mean much to you -
unless you have an idea of what 'normal' is, so I suggest having a tinker
and getting to understand what some of the more usual counters are, what
normal is, and if you get stuck later you can always compare running
systems.

HTH
- Tim

"Paul" wrote in message
...
snip snip

................. I also tried to find info on performance
counters, and didn't have much luck there, either.......

HTH,
Paul

Well, I'm using Win2K, and the Perfmon had nothing in the Window
and there were no resources in the list at the bottom of the screen.

But, I discovered that by double clicking the empty area
(how intuitive...), I got a dialog to pop up with the "add counters"
in it. Gotta confess I'm not an icon guy, and that row of
icons at the top of the screen is just a blur for me. (I'm
a menu guy from way back, and hate the world of tiny icons.)
I never would have considered that big cross up there to be
a plus sign. Maybe if I click the light bulb in the row
of icons, I'll be rewarded with a clue ? (I wonder if Tognazzini,
the Apple interface guru, has anything to say on
the "world of tiny icons" :-)

I found this before making my discovery above. It has the raw
info used to make the "add counters" items.

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...perf_setup.exe

Thanks for bootstrapping me! I never would have wasted
another moment on this interface if you hadn't got
me to click on stuff :-)

Paul