If you are interested in the performance of Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization solution, Mark Friedman, our Founder and CTO, recently put Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology through its paces, subjecting it to a series of CPU and memory stress tests. These tests are similar to the ones he used to evaluate the performance of VMware ESX to help […]
Is there a table somewhere that will take the information in the CPU Family field in the NTCONFIG record (i.e., X86 FAMILY 15 MODEL 2 STEPPING 7 ) and convert that to a specific processor chip manufacturer name and model?
The short answer is that Intel knows what these things means, but does not publish a mapping anywhere of how these internal names correspond to external products. The closest Intel comes is this document at http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/mature/mature.pdf, which does not mention either Family or Stepping names. In semiconductor fabrication, “stepping” refers to the chip manufacturing process […]
Can I use the published clock speed in MHZ of the processor reliably as a relative speed rating?
For back-of-the-envelop capacity planning, it is nice to have a relative speed rating for various processors. You would like to be able to say with confidence that a given processor-bound workload running on machine A running at 400 MHz will execute in 1/3 the time on processor B running at 1.2 GHz that is 3 […]
How should I report on processor utilization for machines running Intel Hyper-threading (HT) technology?
Hyper-threading (HT) is the brand name for the technology Intel uses in many of its Xeon 32-bit processors that enables one physical processor core to execute two instruction streams (or threads) concurrently. On an HT machine, when HT is enabled, each physical processor currently presents two “logical” CPU interfaces to the operating system so that […]
What sort of CPU capture ratios can I expect on my Windows machine?
Pretty good ones for the most part, unless you encounter one of several possible problems. Capture ratios deal with the difference between the theory and practice of computer performance monitoring. In theory, since Windows derives all the CPU time measurements from the same data collection mechanism, the following relationship should hold: S Thread(_Total) % Processor […]
What is the most reliable indicator of CPU contention?
Look at a combination of processor utilization and processor queuing. (1) The primary indicator of processor utilization is the % Processor Time Counter in the Processor Object. Note that the _Total instance of the Processor Object is actually the average value over all processors. The System Object in NT 4.0 contains a Counter named % […]
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From the Blog
- Windows Performance and Capacity Planning Challenges in Virtualized Environments
- Defining and Using Machine Groups in the Performance Sentry PDB
- Microsoft’s Hyper-V Performance — Introduction
- Performance Sentry Cumulative Maintenance Released
- Demand Technology Software Announces v2.4 of the Performance Sentry Web Portal
- Performance Sentry VM 2.0 now available
- Performance Sentry supports Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1
- New Performance Objects in Windows 8 and Server 2012
- MXG and Performance Sentry for Cost Effective Windows Performance Monitoring
- Performance Sentry supports Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
- Performance Sentry Performance Database (PDB) Data Model