Evaluating Memory and Cache Usage
After you have observed memory usage under normal conditions and established your memory baseline, you might notice that the memory counters sometimes stray from the typical range. The following sections describe how to investigate conditions that cause memory values to deviate from the baseline.
The following activities help you to learn about and analyze memory usage and memory bottlenecks by using System Monitor counters and other tools:
Investigating memory shortages
Investigating disk paging
Investigating user-mode memory leaks
Investigating kernel-mode memory leaks
Monitoring the cache
Resolving memory and cache bottlenecks
Table 28.1 summarizes the most important counters to monitor for analyzing memory usage.
Table 28.1 Counters for Analyzing Memory Usage
To monitor for |
Use this Object \ Counter |
---|---|
Memory shortages |
Memory\Available Bytes Process ( All_processes )\Working SetMemory\Pages/secMemory\Cache Bytes |
Frequent hard page faults |
Memory\Pages/secProcess ( All_processes )\Working Set Memory\Pages Input/sec Memory\Pages Output/sec |
Excess paging with a disk bottleneck |
Memory\Page Reads/secPhysical Disk\Avg. Disk Bytes/Read |
Paging file fragmentation |
PhysicalDisk\Split IOs\secPhysicalDisk\% Disk Read TimePhysicalDisk\Current Disk Queue LengthProcess\Handle Count |
Memory leaks; memory-intensive applications |
Memory\Pool Nonpaged AllocationsMemory\Pool Nonpaged BytesMemory\Pool Paged BytesProcess( process_name) \Pool Nonpaged BytesProcess( process_name )\Handle CountProcess( process_name )\Pool Paged BytesProcess( process_name )\Virtual BytesProcess( process_name )\Private Bytes |
Cache Manager efficiency |
Cache\Copy Read Hits %Cache\Copy Reads/secCache\Data Map Hits %Cache\Data Maps/secCache\MDL Read Hits %Cache\MDL Reads/secCache\Pin Read Hits %Cache\Pin Reads/secTo identify cache bottlenecks, also use Memory\Pages Input/sec with these counters. |
Important
The LogicalDisk object counters are not available by default. If you want to monitor the values for these counters, you must first activate the counters by typing diskperf – yv at the Windows command prompt.