Perfmon's counters output format (tip)

Marcelo Fartura — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 03:38:00 GMT

The System Monitor (Perfmon.exe) reports the data gathered through some of its objects and counters with no formatting and depending on what kind of counters are you looking at, or how tired you are, sometimes this can be confusing and even cause misinterpretation problems.

As an example, take the counter Processes::Virtual Bytes. We normally have MBytes or even more than 1GByte being reported, however the output is still reported in bytes with thousands separators. The following picture better illustrates this situation:

The tip to fix it is provided by the article KB300884 - How to: Display Comma Separators in Windows Performance Tool in Windows XP and after changing the registry as instructed in the article, the System Monitor's output will be like the picture below:

Depending on what problem you're troubleshooting you might want to use the Processes and Threads objects. When choosing which process or which thread within a process we want to monitor, the System Monitor does not report a important information called Process ID for processes and Thread ID for the threads. Instead the objects provide a separate counter named ID Process and ID Thread which are supposed to provide these information. So another good tip, that might save you some time, is to create the following registry DWORD values:

KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PerfProc\Performance

ProcessNameFormat = 2

ThreadNameFormat = 2

After restarting the System Monitor, the next time you need to use either the Process or Threads objects, they will appear followed by their ID information as illustrated in the pictures below:

Thank you Brian for the Tip!!!! It has been saving a lot of my time :)

Mfartura's blog : objects

Perfmon's counters output format (tip)

KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PerfProc\Performance