Welcome to the final blog in Windows PerfCounters and Powershell
series and sorry for the delay. The purpose of this blog is to
explain the inner workings of top-script.ps1 script and practical
usage of Performance counters on Windows through Powershell. It
is intended for people who want Linux top - like tool on
Windows.
The script is a part of and available in our existing benchmarking package (dbt2-0.37.50.10) developed
by Mikael Ronstrom.
On Top:If you ever did benchmarking on Linux or simply wondered
"where did all my resources go", top is your best friend. Since
this post is not about Linux, you can google "Linux top
explained" for more details.
On Performance counters:To learn about Windows PerfCounters,
please refer to my previous …
In the last blog I spoke of CPU counters. Now,
I'll talk of Memory counters.
MEMORY Counters (CIM_PhysicalMemory class, Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfOS_Memory class,
Memory Performance Information ...): Note: I
introduced the notion of samples and how to fetch them using
NextValue() so I will occasionally omit $var.NextValue() going
forward.
Let me note here that if you thought previously described
performance classes were complicated, you are now entering the
realm of black magic ;-) There is a good …
So far, I talked of WMI, CIM, WQL,
System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory, perf-counter data
organization and flavour. Now it's time to look at some
performance counters I deem important for my use-case more
closely.
Note: List of available Counters for Get-Counter command
Get-Counter -ListSet * | Sort-Object CounterSetName |
Format-Table CounterSetName
Basic concepts:I will introduce basic concepts of Processor, Core
and CPU now to help you follow the text. Let us use this
convention:
- "Processor" is a piece of hardware you connect to a slot on the motherboard.
- "Physical Core" is a physical computing unit built into the "Processor".
- "Virtual Core" is a virtual computing unit built on top of "Physical Core" (i.e. HT is ON).
- "CPU" is a computing unit inside the "Processor", either physical or virtual.
…