How do we determine hardware functionality?

In this article, we will discuss two counters proposed by Mitch Tulloch to detect if the hardware is functioning properly. The two counters, System\Context Switches/sec and Processor(_Total)\% Privileged Time, both related to processor are great counters to use. In general, by using the two counters, what we want to determine the type of threads that the processor is currently working (or had been working on) and if it is busy handling interrupts instead of performing useful work. Read the rest of this entry »

How do we determine which WebLogic thread is causing CPU contention using PsList?

As mentioned in the title, this is specified to WebLogic application instance. The purpose of doing this is to find out which thread is consuming the most CPU usage and what it is doing at that point of time. This is especially useful when your instance is running at 100% utilization and you want to troubleshoot the problem.

To do that, you have to download the utility, PsTools from Microsoft Sysinternals. PsTools has a command, PsList that can look at the thread level on the OS. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you have enough memory?

Memory\Pages/sec

This counter indicates the number of paging operations to disk, and it is a primary counter to indicate possible insufficient RAM to meet your server’s needs. A recommended benchmark to watch is when the number of pages per second exceeds 50 per paging disk on your system. This is as indicated as hard page faults. (Source: Mitch Tulloch, Windows Networking) Read the rest of this entry »

Are the disks fast enough?

Physical Disk (instance)\Disk Transfers/sec

To monitor disk activity, we can use this counter. When the measurement goes above 25 disk I/Os per second then you’ve got poor response time for your disk (which may well translate to a potential bottleneck. To further uncover the root cause we use the next mentioned counter. Read the rest of this entry »

Do we need to scale up our servers?

Back to the counters Processor(_Total)\Interrupts/sec and System\Context Switches/sec. If Processor(_Total)\Interrupts/sec does not correlate well with System\Context Switches/sec yet you noticed a sudden jump in context switches may instead suggest that your application is hitting its scalability limit on your particular machine and you may need to scale out your application (for example by clustering) or possibly redesign how it handles user mode requests. (Source: Mitch Tulloch, Windows Networking) Read the rest of this entry »