The perfect HD Usage monitor

I consider myself an IT expert but I never found the solution to
this...
My PC has 4GB of RAM but often it's slow because the HD goes into near-
to-100% activity.
I would to know what program/process is causing this near-to-100% HD
activity but I often don't found the solution.

I enabled all the columns related to I/O of the Task Manager but this
often didn't help to find the guilty process.
Then in Windows Vista I tried to see under Resource Monitor - Disk but
this often didn't help too.
I found that both the tools are not always able to well represent the
Process - HD usage association in the same clear way the Task Manager
shows the Process - CPU % usage.

Do you know a program that represents the Process - HD usage
association in the same clear way the Task Manager shows the Process -
CPU % usage?

Luca Villa <> wrote:

>Do you know a program that represents the Process - HD usage
>association in the same clear way the Task Manager shows the Process -
>CPU % usage?

Not the same way but it will show disk usage
FileMon and Process Monitor (also shows reg usage)
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...utilities.mspx
or http://tinyurl.com/yy5vph



--

How to Rip Netflix "Watch Now" movies to your hard drive!
http://forum.rorta.net/showthread.php?t=1134

Luca

I would recommend Process Explorer.

For further information about Process Explorer see here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...sExplorer.mspx

To ascertain which service is causing the problem select the process
producing the high CPU usage, right click, select Properties,
Services. Note there are the full names and
some explanation of what each service does.

You will find further information on Services here:
http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12

To trace the particular Service involved you need to turn off each
service in turn and then restore it noting what effect it has on CPU
usage. However, you need to take care and watch what other Services
are dependent on that service. When you click on the Dependencies tab
allow it a little time to display the information.

--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Luca Villa wrote:
> I consider myself an IT expert but I never found the solution to
> this...
> My PC has 4GB of RAM but often it's slow because the HD goes into
> near- to-100% activity.
> I would to know what program/process is causing this near-to-100% HD
> activity but I often don't found the solution.
>
> I enabled all the columns related to I/O of the Task Manager but this
> often didn't help to find the guilty process.
> Then in Windows Vista I tried to see under Resource Monitor - Disk but
> this often didn't help too.
> I found that both the tools are not always able to well represent the
> Process - HD usage association in the same clear way the Task Manager
> shows the Process - CPU % usage.
>
> Do you know a program that represents the Process - HD usage
> association in the same clear way the Task Manager shows the Process -
> CPU % usage?

> My PC has 4GB of RAM but often it's slow because the HD goes into near-
> to-100% activity.
> I would to know what program/process is causing this near-to-100% HD
> activity but I often don't found the solution.
> Do you know a program that represents the Process - HD usage
> association in the same clear way the Task Manager shows the Process -
> CPU % usage?

Hi Luca,

Sure! Performance Monitor is the Windows tool which provides this facility.

Go to Administrative Tools, Reliability and Performance Monitor and select
"Performance Monitor:" from the Monitoring Tools branch.
(or, if you are Old School, run the command "perfmon").

In Perfmon, hit Crtl-i to Insert a new performance counter (or press the
green cross, on the toolbar).

In the List of available counters, scroll sown to Process, and click the
down arrow on the right to expand the list of counters (PerfMon has a
slightly nonstandard UI in Vista, for some reason).

Use Ctrl- right click to select a few counters - to start off, probably
%Processor Time and IO Data Bytes/second.

Now under Instances, select <all instances> to watch all processes on the
system. Or you can just select a few likely candidate processes (the list of
specific process names only showss currently running processes, so if the
culprit isn't running yet, it won't appear. Use <all instances> to capture
current and future process names).

Hit Add and then OK. And watch the rolling graph ...

If you want to gather data over an extended period, you will need to log the
data to a file. Again, the steps to do this have been made slightly more
complex in Vista, but ... right click on Performance Monitor tab and select
New, Data Collector Set. Give your Data Collector Set a nice name, like
"Lucas Disk IO". Follow the wizard to finish creating the DCS. Then, under
the "Data Collector Set" tab on the laft-hand pane, find your newly created
DCS and select it. In the right-hand pane there will be an entrey "System
Monitor Log". Right-click this and choose Properties. You can add counters
here, same as you did for the interactive graph. When you have finished
adding counters, click OK and then highlight your "Lucas Disk IO" DCS in the
left-hand pane again. Right-clcik and choose Start. The system is now
logging performance data to the log file, defined in your DCS. After data
has been logged, you can use the "View Log Data" toolbar button (or Ctrl-L).
to open the log and view it as a graph or report.

A couple of other respondants mentioned the SysInternals' Process Monitor.
This is indeed an excellent tool to get a good understanding of what your
system is doing, under the covers. But, it doesn't actually measure Disk IO
in relation to CPU performance, as such. Whereas, Performance Monitor was
designed to gather exactly this kind of data. You don't need third-party
add-ons to get a good picture of your performance; Windows already has
built-in tools to provide the info.

You will see that there are a large number of performance counters and
objects in Perfmon, which will allow you to drill down into quite fine
detail on the performance of your system. The same Perfmon tool is used to
analyse performance of heavy-duty web servers and application servers in
data centres, where capacity planning and performance tuning are precise and
sophisticated sciences.

See the online help and search Google for more info about using Perfmon to
measure CPU, Disk IO, Memory usage, network bandwidth, etc.

Hope this helps, good luck!
--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 23:34:55 +0100, Gerry wrote:

> Luca
>
> I would recommend Process Explorer.
>
> For further information about Process Explorer see here:
> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...sExplorer.mspx
>
> To ascertain which service is causing the problem select the process
> producing the high CPU usage, right click, select Properties, Services.
> Note there are the full names and some explanation of what each service
> does.
>
> You will find further information on Services here:
> http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12

http://www.blackviper.com/

The real Black Viper has been updating his domain. He explains what
happened to the domain, when it was down.

<snip>

"Ophelia Cummins" <> wrote in message
news:...
> On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 23:34:55 +0100, Gerry wrote:
>
>> Luca
>>
>> I would recommend Process Explorer.
>>
>> For further information about Process Explorer see here:
>> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...sExplorer.mspx
>>
>> To ascertain which service is causing the problem select the process
>> producing the high CPU usage, right click, select Properties, Services.
>> Note there are the full names and some explanation of what each service
>> does.
>>
>> You will find further information on Services here:
>> http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12
>
> http://www.blackviper.com/
>
> The real Black Viper has been updating his domain. He explains what
> happened to the domain, when it was down.
>
One of my favorites - I can't wait until I have time to go through his new
"Bare-Bones" Vista configuration. Of course, I have to do that in a virtual
PC enviroment so I don't trash my laptop <g>.

Andrew McLaren, thanks for your long answer however I can only specify
drives (e.g. C:, D, not processes, for I/O related counters. Are you
sure that is possible to filter per processes?

"Luca Villa" <> wrote ...
> Andrew McLaren, thanks for your long answer however I can only specify
> drives (e.g. C:, D, not processes, for I/O related counters. Are you
> sure that is possible to filter per processes?

Sure. When you are in Performance Monitor, hit Ctrl-I or press the green
cross in the toolbar. The Add Counters dialogue appears.

In the list of available counters, scroll down to find "Process" (between
Print Queue and Processor).

Click the cross-in-square symbol to the right of "Process", to expand the
list of counters for the Process object.

Use Ctrl-right click, to select these counters:
%Processor Time
IO Data Bytes/sec

Now, under "Instances of selected object", select "<all instances>". Then
press the Add button.

Then hit OK to dismiss the Add counters dialogue. The counters are added to
the Performance Chart.

This will show you the IO Data Bytes/sec for every running process on the
box, as well as te %Processor time the process is using. This should let you
correlate CPU and Data IO for each process. Is this not what you want?

Obviously, selecting <all instances> for Processes produces an almost
overwhelming mass of data. You'll probbaly want to get more refined and just
select specific processes that you are interested in.

Please let me know if this does not match the metrics you were asking for,
in your original post.

--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au