Measuring Processor Utilization in Windows and Windows applications

by Phil

Mark Friedman recently presented his paper at the CMG ’11 International Conference in Washington DC and we have made it available as a White Paper in our download area. You can use this link to retrieve it: Measuring Processor Utilization in Windows

“This paper discusses the legacy technique for measuring processor utilization in Windows that is based on sampling. This technique for measuring processor utilization is efficient and generally adequate for capacity planning. However, it lacks the precision performance engineers require for application optimization and tuning, particularly over small measurement intervals. The paper then introduces newer techniques for measuring processor utilization in Windows that are event-driven. The event-driven approaches are distinguished by far greater accuracy, enabling the reconstruction of the precise path that threads, processes and processors take when they execute. Gathering event-driven measurements entails significantly higher overhead, but measurements indicate this overhead is well within acceptable bounds on today’s high powered server machines.”

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Great to be back!!!

by Mark

After a 4+ year hiatus while I was working at Microsoft, I am back working at DemandTech Software, the company I started in 1998, as of the beginning of 2011.

My name is Mark B. Friedman. I am a professional software developer, author of several popular software products over the years, many of them tools used in computer performance analysis and capacity planning, including NTSMF, Performance Sentry, and the Performance Sentry PDB and Portal.

Before I go any further, let me express my utmost gratitude to Phil Henninge, Joanne Decker, Steve Campbell (and everyone else at DemandTech) who kept the company humming while I was AWOL. I was confident they would, of course, having taken steps to keep the business intact when I left Florida for the Redmond, WA area and the new job in October 2006. But the job they did exceeded my expectations — well done, guys. I am really, really proud of you, and also grateful for the manner in which you have welcomed this prodigal employee back into the fold.

Well, I think that is enough of that mushy stuff, though. Not my style at all.

While at Microsoft, I worked in the Developer Division, the part of the company that produces Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and other developer tools. If you would like to catch up with some of the work I did there, you can check out the DevDiv performance engineering team blog I started in 2008 located at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ddperf/ .

I just set up a new blog at http://performancebydesign.blogspot.com/, which is intended as both a continuation and extention of the old one at Microsoft. It is a place where I can ruminate on current topics of interest, and consolidate some older material that I have been stockpiling, possibly for an updated version of my Windows Performance Guide book. (I noticed recently that MS Press is no longer selling the Win2K3 Resource Kit, the original Win2K book is definitely its age, and there currently isn’t a suitable up-to-date replacement or substitute available.)

However, while there is definitely a need, I am not promising anything in the book department. (Writing a book is so time consuming!) Near term, I am quite busy helping to get the next version of Sentry and the Portal ready to ship, and reconnecting with our customers to figure out how we go forward from here.

In the meantime, if you want to touch base, please drop me a line at my old, familiar markf @ demandtech.com e-mail address.

It is great to be back.

Regards,

– Mark

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Workaround for Telerik WPF RadNumericUpDown Control Minimum Value Binding Problem

by admin

Summary
 

There is a known problem whereby binding in the Telerik RadNumericUpDown control is broken.  If a minimum value is greater than zero, then the WPF binding of the control will break during initialization. For our design, this rendered the control unusable.

Since this problem has not been fixed nor appears to be fixed any time soon, I took it upon myself to investigate and code a workaround to prevent design changes, further development costs, and a schedule impact.

 
Background

For the next generation of our Performance Sentry™ Administration application we chose WPF as the platform and elected to utilize the Telerik for WPF controls.  Our Data Collection Sets (DCSs) have numerous data collection parameters with different custom types that allow very flexible data collection through our Performance Sentry™ product.  To allow the user to edit these properties, I created a DCS property editor user control.  This component takes advantage of WPF in that it renders each property with a content presenter based upon the property type.  The property types each have a class to represent them and new classes and presenters can be added as needed. With this framework in place, maintenance is easier since the code is object oriented and located in one place.

Implementation

For numeric properties with a specified range, we had previous used a numeric up down control in WinForms which did not require data validation.  Telerik has a RadNumericUpDown control that would be a perfect replacement for the WinForms version.

Here is a picture of the DCS property editor constructed in WPF using Telerik controls:

Take a look at the xaml for the ListView that is used to allow the user to edit these properties. [click to continue…]

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2010 CMG International Conference is Now Underway

by Steve

Phil Henninge explaining our Performance Sentry VM Product to an interested attendee

The 2010 CMG International Conference opened on Monday to extremely positive reviews.  Educational sessions have been both well attended and well received and there are a larger than usual number of first time attendees this year.  It’s amazing what having the show in a warm weather climate does for attendance.

We had a great time at the booth yesterday catching up with old friends and meeting a lot of very interesting people for the first time.    CMG is one of those shows that people try and attend every year and it doesn’t take long for a sense of community to develop.

If you are in Orlando for the conference please stop by our booth to introduce yourself and let us know your thoughts on the show so far.

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Join us at the CMG 2010 International Conference in Orlando this December

by Steve

CMG’10, the 36th Annual International Conference on Resource Management and Computer Performance Evaluation is being held December 5th -10th at the beautiful Gaylord Hotel in Orlando, Florida.

This is a conference that Demand attends every year and we’re extremely pleased to have it held in our home state this year.    We’re looking forward to showing off both our technology and the wonderful weather we have in Florida each December.  If you’re on the fence about this years CMG it’s time to jump off and make plans to attend.

Program Chair Timothy Hill and his Program Committee have assembled an agenda that offers the systems performance and capacity planning community a full week of comprehensive training by industry-recognized experts as well as IT professionals just like you. This conference offers attendees a chance to interface with presenters in a variety of venues including workshops, “how-to” tutorials, and informal networking, as well as user-experience and problem-solving presentation sessions.  And of course a chance to meet with your friends at Demand Technology.

For more information on CMG ’10 please visit the CMG website here.

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Server Performance Drives Down IT Costs

by Steve

Bryce Olson, at The Server Room Blog has written an interesting and detailed post on how server performance can reduce overall IT expenses.  In the post he quotes Vernon Turner, the Senior VP of IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure, Consumer and Telecom research group as saying:

“I think TCO is top of mind when customers evaluate server infrastructure.  Performance is important because that drives how many servers are required to achieve the customers productivity goals.  And that drives the downstream costs associated with software, power & cooling, rack/floor space, networking and maintenance fees.”

Seems obvious, right?    But is it really something you’re thinking about when you’re managing the performance of your server farm?  There are performance issues that impact the user experience and there are performance guidelines and sizing issues that can seriously impact your IT budget.

Please read the entire Server Room Blog post here.

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Performance Sentry VM goes GA today

by Steve

We’re very pleased to announce the General Availability of Performance Sentry VM.  The product has been in beta for the past few months and the GA version went live on the site early this morning.  To learn more or kick the tires please click the appropriate link.

Learn more about Performance Sentry VM

Kick the Tires – Try out Performance Sentry VM

Find out what objects and counters Performance Sentry VM collects

Download a Management Pack to use Performance Sentry VM with Microsoft’s SCOM

Or, just send us an email at sales@demandtech.com.

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Setting up a VMware Demonstration Environment on a Laptop

by Phil

I needed to set up a mobile demo environment to show off our new VMware performance monitor and wanted something that could be hosted on a Windows laptop running ESX Server and a few different Virtual Machines.

I started with an HP Pavilion dv7 quad-core Intel i7 running Windows 7 x64  with 8 GB of memory.

Then I installed VMware Workstation 7 and defined an ESX 3.5 Server Virtual machine in Workstation with 6GB of memory and a 100 GB virtual disk.

(Please note all videos are HD and look great in full screen mode)

After setting up the ESX Server the next step was to download and install vClient to manage the Virtual Server.

The final step in the process was to configure and install virtual machines and VMware tools. For our purposes we needed two different virtual machines but the video below just shows the installation of Windows Server 2008 and VMware tools.

When I was done we had the mobile demonstration environment we needed to show off our new product.

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Demand Tech releases SCOM Management Pack for Performance Sentry VM

by Steve

Demand Technology Software is pleased to announce the release of the Performance Sentry VM Management Pack for Systems Center Operations Manager .  The Management Pack integrates the VMware ESX performance metrics provided by Performance Sentry VM with Microsoft’s popular Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) data center management product.

The PSVM Management Pack requires both Performance Sentry VM and Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (SCOM 2007 R2).

Guest vs Host Aggregate CPU Displayed in SCOM

Performance Sentry VM uses Server 2008 counters.  There can be issues with SCOM 2007 R2 not showing these 2008 counters. As a result, we recommend installing SCOM 2007 Cumulative Update 2 if you have not already done so from  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979257.

Guest CPU Displayed in SCOM

The Performance Sentry VM Management Pack for Systems Microsoft Center Operations Manager is currently free and can be downloaded from our download page or directly from here.

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Installing Performance Sentry VM on Windows Server 2008

by Steve

Phil put together this quick video demonstrating the installation steps for installing Performance Sentry VM on Windows Server 2008.  At the end of the video he also adds some counters and shows the data in real time using Perfmon.

The video is in HD and is easily viewed in full screen mode.

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