Analyzing Processor Activity

After you have identified a processor bottleneck, you need to determine whether a single process is using the processor or whether many running processes are consuming the processor. To do this, log the processor time for each process that is running on your computer as follows:

• Select the Process object.

• Select the % Processor Time counter.

• Select each process instance.
  
  Important
  All processes that are running appear in the Instance box listed by the name of the associated executable program (for example, Windows Explorer appears as explorer in the Instance box). Note that if you are running multiple instances of the same executable program, System Monitor lists these under the identical name; thus, you need to track these by their process identifiers. You can find the process identifier by using the Process\ Process ID counter or by adding the process identifier (PID) column in Task Manager. For more information, see Threads in a Bottleneck later in this chapter.

For more information about MS-DOS-based and 16-bit Windows-based processes that appear differently in the user interface, see Overview of Performance Monitoring in this book and also see Windows 2000 Server Help.