Analyzing Processor Activity

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Investigate the individual thread or threads of the process or processes running during a bottleneck to understand more about the activity consuming the processor. Monitor the following factors to understand how thread activity is contributing to the problem and whether the cause is a single process or multiple processes:

  • The number of threads in each process that is running during a bottleneck.

  • The amount of processor time a thread is consuming.

  • The priority level at which threads are scheduled to run.

  • The amount of time the threads are using the processor in privileged mode.

You can use performance counters to analyze thread activity and adjust thread scheduling to allow more processor time for bottlenecked processes.

Apart from adjusting the threads scheduling priority, you cannot alter thread behavior without changing the program code of the associated application. However, if you have access to application source code, you can write counters to monitor thread activity at a lower level. For more information, see the Microsoft Platform SDK link on the Web Resources page at https://windows.microsoft.com/windows2000/reskit/webresources .