My PC has 4GB of RAM but often it's slow because the HD goes into near-
to-100% activity.
I would to know what program/process is causing this near-to-100% HD
activity but I often don't found the solution.
Do you know a program that represents the Process - HD usage
association in the same clear way the Task Manager shows the Process -
CPU % usage?
Hi Luca,
Sure! Performance Monitor is the Windows tool which provides this facility.
Go to Administrative Tools, Reliability and Performance Monitor and select
"Performance Monitor:" from the Monitoring Tools branch.
(or, if you are Old School, run the command "perfmon").
In Perfmon, hit Crtl-i to Insert a new performance counter (or press the
green cross, on the toolbar).
In the List of available counters, scroll sown to Process, and click the
down arrow on the right to expand the list of counters (PerfMon has a
slightly nonstandard UI in Vista, for some reason).
Use Ctrl- right click to select a few counters - to start off, probably
%Processor Time and IO Data Bytes/second.
Now under Instances, select <all instances> to watch all processes on the
system. Or you can just select a few likely candidate processes (the list of
specific process names only showss currently running processes, so if the
culprit isn't running yet, it won't appear. Use <all instances> to capture
current and future process names).
Hit Add and then OK. And watch the rolling graph ...
If you want to gather data over an extended period, you will need to log the
data to a file. Again, the steps to do this have been made slightly more
complex in Vista, but ... right click on Performance Monitor tab and select
New, Data Collector Set. Give your Data Collector Set a nice name, like
"Lucas Disk IO". Follow the wizard to finish creating the DCS. Then, under
the "Data Collector Set" tab on the laft-hand pane, find your newly created
DCS and select it. In the right-hand pane there will be an entrey "System
Monitor Log". Right-click this and choose Properties. You can add counters
here, same as you did for the interactive graph. When you have finished
adding counters, click OK and then highlight your "Lucas Disk IO" DCS in the
left-hand pane again. Right-clcik and choose Start. The system is now
logging performance data to the log file, defined in your DCS. After data
has been logged, you can use the "View Log Data" toolbar button (or Ctrl-L).
to open the log and view it as a graph or report.
A couple of other respondants mentioned the SysInternals' Process Monitor.
This is indeed an excellent tool to get a good understanding of what your
system is doing, under the covers. But, it doesn't actually measure Disk IO
in relation to CPU performance, as such. Whereas, Performance Monitor was
designed to gather exactly this kind of data. You don't need third-party
add-ons to get a good picture of your performance; Windows already has
built-in tools to provide the info.
You will see that there are a large number of performance counters and
objects in Perfmon, which will allow you to drill down into quite fine
detail on the performance of your system. The same Perfmon tool is used to
analyse performance of heavy-duty web servers and application servers in
data centres, where capacity planning and performance tuning are precise and
sophisticated sciences.
See the online help and search Google for more info about using Perfmon to
measure CPU, Disk IO, Memory usage, network bandwidth, etc.
Hope this helps, good luck!
, not processes, for I/O related counters. Are you