Monitoring the performance bottleneck of Windows 7 system

encountered performance bottlenecks, the system was dragged, this is undoubtedly the situation that administrators do not want to see. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft has strengthened the monitoring of the performance of various resources of the system, the main technical means called performance counters. With these counters, we can effectively monitor the system to identify and resolve system performance bottlenecks. This article will talk to you about monitoring the most important system resources of memory, disk, and network in Windows 7 to discover and resolve the technical details of performance bottlenecks.

1, monitor and solve the memory bottleneck

Windows 7 is a relatively expensive system, Microsoft recommends a minimum of 1GB of memory, although 512MB of memory can also be installed Windows 7, but such a system It is not practical at all. Moreover, programs running in Windows 7 also use a lot of memory, which makes many old users of small memory worse. If you install Windows 7 with the minimum amount of memory required, there is no doubt that the system will not perform optimally. But at the same time, even with the recommended amount of memory installed, the performance of the system may not be optimal. This is because the system's memory requirements depend on many factors, including the choice of installed Windows 7 components, the effects that are turned on, and the configuration of the application and the computer itself.

For Windows systems, we know that the system needs to use both physical and virtual memory. Physical memory is no longer mentioned. Virtual memory refers to the amount of memory written to the paging file on disk. The speed at which paging files read and write data depends on the performance of the disk system and is much slower than accessing physical memory. Therefore, no one is willing to use paging files too frequently.

Before you plan to monitor memory usage, you first need to check if your computer has enough memory to run the system and application software. Then you need to determine how the system uses memory and check for problems. We should closely monitor the amount of available memory and the amount of virtual memory being used. If the system has very little available memory, you might want to add a memory stick. In general, the amount of available memory should not be less than 5% of the total amount of physical memory installed in the system. If it is found through monitoring that the amount of virtual memory used by Windwos 7 is much higher than the total amount of physical memory, we need to add a new memory stick to solve the tight memory situation. For more details, please refer to the author's previous article "Vista Performance Monitoring to find the strongest state of the system"

In addition, you need to understand how the system uses paging files. If a process requests a page in memory but the system cannot find it in the requested location, it indicates that a page fault has occurred. A soft page fault can result if the requested page is in a different location in memory; a hard page fault can result if the requested page must be retrieved from a page file on disk. Most processors can handle a large number of soft errors, which can cause some delay. If there are a lot of hard page faults in the system, you will need to increase the memory consumption, which will of course reduce system performance.

After understanding the above knowledge about Windows memory management, let's take a look at the counters in Windows 7 that can be used to check for memory bottlenecks. In Windows 7, the most commonly used counters related to memory monitoring are 14, and I choose three of them to compare key counters for parsing.

MemoryAvailable Bytes This counter records the number of bytes of physical memory on the computer that can be used to run processes. If the amount of available memory is less than 5%, the system is out of memory and performance is degraded. At this point, the system will frequently page the memory to the hard disk to ensure resource requirements. If the amount of available memory is less than 128MB, performance will be lower. In this case, the system will continue to page the memory to the hard disk and try to "borrow" the memory from the running process to ensure the resource requirements. If the problem of lack of memory is very serious, it is usually caused by memory leaks.

MemoryCommitted Bytes This counter records the number of bytes of virtual memory that have been committed. Its value represents the memory that has been paged to disk and is in use. If the computer uses more virtual memory than the total amount of physical memory installed in the system, then the solution to the system bottleneck is to add physical memory.

MemoryCommit Limit This counter shows the amount of physical memory and virtual memory available. As the number of Committed Bytes grows, the paging file may reach the maximum allowed. If the initial page file is set too small, the system may repeatedly expand the paging file size, which requires a certain amount of system resources. Therefore, it is recommended that you set the initial page size according to actual needs, or directly use the ancient page file size. Normally, we can set it to twice the size of physical memory.

The above three counters are the most commonly used counters in system memory monitoring. In actual combat, we can also perform more in-depth monitoring of system memory with other counters. With the flexibility to apply these counters, we can monitor memory in Windwos 7 and find memory bottlenecks that affect system performance. (Figure 1)

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2, monitor and solve disk bottlenecks

Although in the Windows 7 era, hard drives will rarely become system performance bottleneck. However, because there is not enough available memory, the system needs to page the memory to the movie, causing frequent hard disk read and write. Because the read and write speed of the hard disk is much slower than the memory, too frequent paging will reduce the overall performance of the system. Therefore, we should reduce the disk participation in memory paging as much as possible, let the system manage the memory effectively, and page to the hard disk when necessary. That is, you can take some action on your system's hard drive to improve performance. Today's hard drives are very cheap, and there are not a few users who are adding new hard drives to install Windows 7. This way, if the new hard drive is faster than the hard drive that holds the paging file, you should consider moving the paging file to that hard drive. In addition, if the performance of the two hard drives is equivalent, but one of the hard drives takes a lot of work, and the other hard drives are idle most of the time, so we should also consider putting the paging files on other hard drives, balancing the load and improving System performance.

Let's take a look at the counters that can be used to check disk performance in Windows 7. The most commonly used counters in Windows 7 are six. The author describes the three most important counters.

PhysicalDiskCurrent Disk Queue Length This counter records the number of system requests waiting for a disk to be processed. If this value is high, it indicates that the disk waits for the system. In general, the fewer requests waiting to be processed, the better.

PhysicalDiskDisk Writes/Sec This counter records the number of disk write operations per second. This value can represent how much disk I/O activity is. By tracking the number of write operations per second and the size of the write queue, we can determine the impact of disk performance on write operations.

PhysicalDiskDisk Reads/Sec This counter records the number of disk reads per second. Its meaning is similar to the above write counter, except for the read performance of the disk at the time of the reaction.

These three counters are the main counters we use to monitor the system disk in Windows 7. Through the monitoring data provided by us, we can judge the performance of the current disk and solve the disk bottleneck. (Figure 2)

3, monitor and solve network bottlenecks

In addition to hardware resources such as memory and disk, the network is also an important system resource, of course, also the user Part of the overall performance of Windows 7 is evaluated. From the user's perspective, the responsiveness of the network can greatly affect the responsiveness of users when connecting their computers to other computers. Regardless of how fast the computer is, if there is a long delay between the computer sending the request and receiving the request, we tend to think that the performance response is too slow, so the monitoring of network performance should also be considered as system performance monitoring. portion.

There are four main counters available for network monitoring in Windows 7, and the following explanations are given separately.

Network InterfaceBytes Total/Sec This counter records the speed at which data is sent and received over the network card. If there are multiple network cards installed in the system, we need to separately monitor and monitor. If the Bytes Total/Sec value of one of the network cards suddenly becomes slower, even slower than the expected network speed and network card speed, then we need to check the network card. Configure to address performance bottlenecks. For example, whether the connection of the network card is set to full duplex, whether the traffic is limited or the like.

Network InterfaceCurrent BandWidth This counter estimates the current bandwidth of the selected NIC in bits per second. Similarly, if multiple NICs are installed in the system, we need to track and monitor each NIC.

Network InterfaceBytes Received/Sec This counter records the rate at which data is received through the network card. When installing multiple network cards in the system, we also need to track and monitor each network card.

Network InterfaceBytes Send/Sec This counter records the rate at which data is received through the network card. It is used in a similar way to the Bytes Received/Sec counter.

These four counters are very useful in our network monitoring. They not only provide us with real-time data of current network performance, but also are very convenient for analysis and comparison in multi-NIC systems. (Figure 3)

Summary: System monitoring is the basis for solving system performance bottlenecks. For the new system of Windows 7, many of its features are not familiar to us. The monitoring counters provided by the system monitor the system. Whether we understand the system deeply or solve the system bottleneck, the system performance is very good. helpful.