Click here to Skip to main content
15,886,362 members
Please Sign up or sign in to vote.
1.00/5 (2 votes)
Just recently my PC's performance has become dismal, I even got about 10 'pauses' in the editor while typing these two sentences. Now if I used Process Explorer, I can sort by CPU, memory, and IO, descending, so the culprits are always visible at the top of the table.

The problem with that is that the top resource hogs change very rapidly, and it is hard to narrow down processes that are long term hogs. I would like to monitor per process CPU, memory, and IO over several hours or days, and log this data, and then extract reports to identify the lager and more consistent hogs.

I have looked at Process Monitor, but that seems more oriented to capture process activities vs. overall resource usage, and I haven't yet found a way to aggregate these activities by summing and grouping by process.

The problem sometimes seems to be I/O related, based on Process Explorer, and sometimes on CPU "overloading". I would like to track and log usage of these resources per process, for every process, over a period of 24 to 48 hours, as the sluggishness is transient.

It is however more pronounced in some applications, like Chrome and Visual Studio, while e.g. Notepad++ suffers no bad performance. I am also starting to suspect slow memory paging to and from disk, and am anxiously awaiting opportunity to get an SSD for the OS and one or two large on I/O apps, but that will take some time.

I am looking for some sort of third party tool - free or trial - that will let me collection CPU %, IO reads/writes, and memory usage, per say top ten processes over a few hours, and then hopefully display graphs of these over time, or at least give me real data, to either look at or graph myself.

What I have tried:

I have tried just watching Process Explorer, in vain, as when I sort by usage descending, all I see is current use, which jumps up and down and isn't much use as a time span monitor.

I have tried Windows Performance Monitor (WPM), but that effectively only gives me performance counter totals, and I have not figured out how to count these per process, so all I see when I eventually graph the dataset is total counts from all processes.
Posted
Updated 18-Feb-17 19:01pm
v2
Comments
Michael_Davies 18-Feb-17 9:11am    
How much free space on your operating system drive, usually C:?
Brady Kelly 18-Feb-17 10:10am    
About 100GB
Michael_Davies 18-Feb-17 10:37am    
100gb out of what size HD, 10% and less free can cause problems.

Also look at using perfmon:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/use-windows-performance-monitor-like-power-user/
Brady Kelly 18-Feb-17 10:50am    
Thanks for the link, looks like it has some other useful stuff as well, but as I say in my OP, I can't find a way for WPM to give me per-process data, only per-counter data. I want to single out a few process I can obliterate before having to totally reinstall windows.
Richard Deeming 18-Feb-17 9:23am    
Have you looked at the built-in Performance Monitor?
Overview of Windows Performance Monitor[^]

The article doesn't specifically mention Windows 10, but that's just because it hasn't been updated. The tool still works in the same way.

1 solution

You shouldn't get "pauses" on Windows 10 since the scheduler is pretty good, however:

1) Pauses could indicate cpu heat problems, so check your system's fans and clean and lubricate them (WD40 is excellent).
2) Disconnect from the internet and see if you still have problems.
3) Update your system to the latest OS patch and check your drivers are up to date.
4) Check your system for viruses and malware.
5) Shutdown all apps and services but the ones you need and work back from there to find the culprit.
 
Share this answer
 
Comments
Brady Kelly 19-Feb-17 1:07am    
This is my dev machine. It has hundreds of apps and processes that I need, and shutting everything down and restarting as needed is entirely not feasible vs re-installing Windows; it will take days longer to figure out what is not working and why due to obscure error messages.

Like I said, I am looking for a tool to monitor processes' usage of resources over time. It is really simple and I cannot believe there is not already one.

Oh, and my OS is up to date, and I am virus free. Online and offline often shpw the same behaviour.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)



CodeProject, 20 Bay Street, 11th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5J 2N8 +1 (416) 849-8900