Measuring Performance under Windows with Perfmon

Please note that this article / this category refers either on older software / hardware components or is no longer maintained for other reasons. This page is no longer updated and is purely for reference purposes still here in the archive available.

This article will describe how to measure performance under Windows using the Perfmon utility.

Specifically, this article will be about I/O performance. Using Perfmon, all of the system components can in fact be analyzed.

Perfmon is included with Windows by default.

The objective is to measure the I/O load on the data media on the system for a corresponding interval, in order to size the target system properly.

Steps

• Start Perfmon using the Run menu option. perfmon.exe

The gallery will show the steps after that as images.

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  Step 1: Create a new performance counter log
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  Step 2: Assign it a unique name (such as, Company_HostName_Purpose)
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  Step 3: Add the performance counters
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  Step 4: Add the PhysicalDisk object and select all instances

Choose from the following counters:

• Bytes read/s (all instances)
• Bytes written/s (all instances)
• Idle time (%) (all instances)
• Average bytes / read (all instances)
• Average bytes / write (all instances)
• Average seconds / read (all instances)
• Average seconds / write (all instances)
• Disk reads / second (all instances)
• Disk writes / second (all instances)

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  Step 5: Appearance when all counters have been added
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  Step 6: Setting the log file properties
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  Step 7: Scheduling the measurements