Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Looking for a process monitor that may not exist ...

(1/2) > >>

barney:
Folk,

Warning:  this may get a bit long.

I'm trying to find a process monitor that shows usages in near-real-time. 

It should show usage aggregates for 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes ...

Ideally 'twould show CPU activity, Disk I/O activity, RAM activity, GPU/graphics activity, traffic activity, maybe a few others, and log such as well as actively display.

Rationale.

Currently running Win7 RC (but have had similar problems with 2K/XP), and I'm running into periodic lockups.  Some are obviously CPU related, but others are not.  There tend to be three symptoms, although not always concurrent:  jerky, erratic cursor control; window/screen refresh issues;  hard disk i/o or network traffic issues.  I know - ? - that some of the lockups are GPU related, and suspect that some are read/write related.  (On the GPU side, I've enabled/disabled Aero, to no avail.)

There are a number of tools that will show real-time usage, but the changes tend to be too fast for these old eyes to record.  Back in the corporate world, a decade ago, there was a utility on a DEC LAN - VMS? - that would log activity history for CPU, disk i/o, & traffic.  I've yet to find any such tool for the current Windows world.  Thought I might find something cross-platform at FreshMeat, but, alas, that seems fated not to be.

So ... anyone have a reference to any such tool(s)?

MilesAhead:
Nothing comes to mind other than the SysInternals suite.  You can download free from just about any download site, or from Microsoft downloads. I know I always see the updates on www.AfterDawn.com

Have you check for hardware i/o conflicts?  That's what it sounds like.

f0dder:
With the video driver model Vista introduced (and win7 obviously continued), you shouldn't be getting BSODs from driver faults; the video driver runs in usermode and can just be restarted. (Hardware faults is a different matter, of course). From your description, my guess is you have flaky hardware... if you get BSOD-and-reboot (as opposed to really messy hardware faults), Windows should keep a minidump file which you can investigate to find out more about the issue - this is likely going to be a lot more valuable than the process monitor idea you've got.

barney:
MilesAhead:  Yeah, SysInternals give me a lot of info ... it's just scattered out over multiple apps/utilities.

f0dder:  Maybe I made this sound more desperate as a situation than it is.  I do get BSODs, but that's from a known driver problem that has yet to be addressed by the vendor ... not a biggie.  The usual code is 0x00...0A, and I checked the dump(s) - that's how I isolated the driver issue - but just can't fix that until the vendor gets off their [collective] butt and addresses it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is more a pipe dream than a gotta fix it now.

I've been looking for such a thing, off and on, ever since I was exposed to the VAX/VMS logger.  There are utilities that do a lot of what I want, but they're all single-purpose, and damned few of 'em include logging over time.  Not looking for a magic bullet, but I would like to find something that would load the gun, so to speak.

What I'd like to find, if it exists, is a tool that will display/log conflicts averaged over a [specified] time span for most of the significant conflict areas.  Since I'm the go-to for a number of folk, I'd like something a bit more concrete than, "What did the message say?  I dunno, I just clicked the button to get it out of the way."  The event logs & system logs help, but a lot of preliminary stuff doesn't get logged, just the end result.  A system dump is all well and good, but it doesn't say whattranspired prior to the dump, just the machine state at the time of the dump.  I want tracks.

I've even considered using a key logger on a coupla folk, but that still wouldn't tell me what happened, and it's just a bit short of ethical <sigh />.

Just wishful thinkin' I guess.  (But as long as I'm wishin', be nice if this tool would run from a thumb drive, as well.)

bgd77:
How you tried Windows 7 Resource and Performance Monitor? From what I know, you can make it monitor all the resource elements that you want and save all the data in a log (for this I think that it may be necessary to start it from command line, but i'm not sure about this). From what I know, Process Explorer from Sysinternals cannot save data in a log file.

Here are a few sites I found when searching it on google:

http://www.windows7update.com/Windows7-Performance-Monitor.html
http://www.nirmaltv.com/2009/07/29/5-ways-to-monitor-and-improve-windows-7-performance/

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page