Evaluating Memory and Cache Usage

Use this quick guide to view the topics and tasks related to monitoring memory usage in Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional.

 Learn about memory requirements.

Memory has such an important influence on system performance that monitoring and analyzing memory usage is one of the first steps you take when assessing your systems performance.

• See Overview of Memory Monitoring later in this chapter.

 Verify that you have the appropriate amount of installed memory.

A memory shortage is a significant cause of performance problems. Therefore, one of the first steps in examining memory usage is to rule out the existence of a shortage by learning both how much memory is required for the operating system and your workload and how much is available on your system.

• See Determining the Amount of Installed Memory later in this chapter.

 Establish a baseline for memory usage.

A performance baseline is the level of performance you can reliably expect during typical usage and workloads. When you have a baseline established, it becomes easier to identify when your system is experiencing performance problems, because counter levels are out of the baseline range.

• See Establishing a Baseline for Memory later in this chapter.

 Use memory counters to identify excessive paging, memory shortages, and memory leaks that slow system performance.

Changes in memory counter values can be used to detect the presence of various performance problems. Tracking counter values both on a system-wide and a per-process basis helps you to pinpoint the cause.

• See Investigating Memory Problems later in this chapter.

 Monitor how your applications use the file system cache,and learn to use the cache and memory counters to evaluate application efficiency.

The cache and memory counters provide information about how applications running on your system make use of the file system cache. To accurately assess cache efficiency, you need to understand which counters to use and how to interpret their values.

• See Resolving Memory and Cache Bottlenecks later in this chapter.

 Tune or upgrade memory resources as needed to improve performance.

When you have determined the cause of a memory bottleneck, you can undertake steps to correct the problem by adding memory, removing unnecessary services, tuning inefficient applications, or other tuning methods.

• See Resolving Memory and Cache Bottlenecks later in this chapter.