Monitor performance bottlenecks in Windows 7 systems

Encountering performance bottlenecks, the system is being dragged down, which is no doubt the administrator does not want to see the situation. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft has stepped up its monitoring of the performance of the system's resources, the main technical means of the so-called performance counters. Using these counters, we can monitor the system effectively, and then find and solve the performance bottleneck of the system. This article will talk to you about the three most important system resources of memory, disk, and network in Windows 7 to identify and address the technical details of performance bottlenecks.

1. Monitor and resolve memory bottleneck

Windows 7 is a memory-consuming system, and Microsoft recommends a minimum of 1GB of RAM, although 512MB of memory can be installed with Windows 7, but that system is simply not practical. Also, programs that run in Windows 7 use a large amount of memory, which makes many small-memory old machine users worse. If you install Windows 7 with the minimum amount of memory required, there is no doubt that the system will not reach the optimal state of operation. But at the same time, even with the recommended number of memory installation, the system may not be able to achieve optimal performance. This is because the memory requirements of the system depend on a number of factors, including the choice of installed Windows 7 components, the open effects, and the configuration of the application and the computer itself.

For Windows systems, we know that the system needs both physical and virtual memory. Physical memory is no longer redundant, and virtual memory refers to the amount of memory written to the paging file on disk. The speed with which the paging file reads and writes data depends on the performance of the disk system, much slower than accessing physical memory. As a result, none of us would ever want to use a paging file frequently.

Before you intend to monitor memory usage, you first need to check that your computer has enough memory to run the system and application software, and then you need to determine how the system uses memory and check for problems. We should closely monitor the amount of available memory and the amount of virtual memory being used. If the system has a very small amount of available memory, you may want to add a memory bar. In general, the amount of available memory should not be less than 5% of the total physical memory installed in the system. If monitoring finds that Windwos 7 uses more virtual memory than the total amount of physical memory, we need to add new memory strips to solve the memory crunch situation. Learn more about the details can refer to the author's previous article "Vista performance Monitoring system to retrieve the strongest status" (http://winsystem.ctocio.com.cn/vista/217/8755217.shtml)

In addition, you need to understand how the system uses the paging file. If a process requests an in-memory page, but the system cannot be found at the requested location, it indicates that a page fault has occurred. If the requested page is in another location in memory, it causes a soft page error, and if the requested page must be retrieved from the paging file on disk, it can cause a hard page error. Most processors can handle a large number of soft errors, and a hard error can cause a certain delay. If there is a large number of hard page errors in the system, you will need to increase memory consumption, of course, reduce system performance.

Having learned more about Windows memory management, let's look at the counters in Windows 7 that you can use to check for memory bottlenecks. In Windows 7, the most commonly used counters associated with memory monitoring are 14, and the author chooses 3 key counters to parse.

Memoryavailable Bytes This counter records the number of bytes on the computer that are available for the total amount of physical memory that can be used to run processes. If the amount of available memory is less than 5%, the system lacks memory and performance degrades. At this point, the system will frequently paging memory to the hard disk to ensure resource requirements. If the amount of available memory is less than 128MB, performance will be lower. In this case, the system keeps paging memory to the hard disk and tries to "borrow" memory from the running process to ensure the resource needs. If the problem of lack of memory is very serious, it is usually caused by a memory leak problem.

memorycommitted Bytes This counter records the number of bytes of virtual memory that have been committed. The value represents the memory that has been paged to disk and is in use. If the computer uses more virtual memory than the total number of physical memory installed in the system, the solution to the system bottleneck is to add physical memory.

Memorycommit Limit This counter displays the amount of physical memory and virtual memory available. As the number of committed bytes grows, the paging file may reach the maximum allowable value. If you set the initial paging file too small, your system may repeatedly expand the paging file size, which requires a certain amount of system resources. Therefore, it is advisable to set the initial page size according to actual needs, or to use the ancient paging file size directly. In general, we can set it to be twice times the size of physical memory.

The above 3 counters are the most commonly used counters in the system memory monitoring, in the actual combat we can also cooperate with other counters on the system memory implementation of more in-depth monitoring. Using these counters flexibly we can monitor memory in Windwos 7 and find memory bottlenecks that affect system performance. (Figure 1)

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2. Monitor and resolve disk bottlenecks

Although in the Windows 7 era, hard drives rarely become bottlenecks in system performance. However, because there is not enough available memory, the system needs to paging memory to the movie causing frequent hard drive reads and writes. Because hard drives read and write faster than memory, paging too frequently can degrade the overall performance of the system. So, we want to reduce disk participation memory paging as much as possible, let the system manage memory effectively, and want $ page to hard disk when necessary. That is, you can take some action on the system's hard disk to improve performance. Today's hard drives are cheap and there are also a few users who add new hard disks to install Windows 7. This way, if the new hard disk is faster than the hard disk that saved the paging file, you should consider moving the paging file to that hard disk. In addition, if the two hard drives have the same performance, but one of the hard drives takes up a lot of work, and the other drives are idle for most of the time, we should also consider putting the paging file on the other hard drive, balancing the load and improving system performance.

Let's take a look at the counters in Windows 7 that you can use to check for disk performance, with 6 of the most commonly used counters in Windows 7, and the author describes the 3 most important counters.

Physicaldiskcurrent Disk Queue Length This counter records the number of system requests that are waiting to be processed for disk access, and if this value is high, the disk wait affects system energy. Generally, the fewer requests to be processed, the better.

Physicaldiskdisk writes/sec This counter to record the number of disk writes per second. This value can represent how much disk I/O activity is, by tracking the number of writes per second and the size of the write operation queue, we are able to determine the impact of disk performance on the next write operation.

Physicaldiskdisk reads/sec This counter records the number of disk read operations per second. The meaning is similar to the write counter above, except that the read performance of the disk is reflected.

These 3 counters are the main counters that we monitor the system disk in Windows 7, and we can determine the performance of the current disk and troubleshoot disk bottlenecks with the monitoring data provided. (Figure 2)