Windows 2000 Performance Guide

Chapter 2. Measurement Methodology

Microsoft Windows 2000 comes equipped with extensive facilities for monitoring performance, and these have been available in the operating system since its inception. The Windows 2000 performance monitoring API is the name we coined to describe the built-in facilities for monitoring system activity in Windows 2000. In this chapter, we take a thorough look at this API, which is the main source of the performance statistics that system administrators and application developers utilize.

Performance Monitoring on Windows

The performance monitoring statistics available in Windows 2000 are quite extensive. At a basic level, they report on processor, memory, disk, and network usage, for example. Windows 2000 also measures and reports on the utilization of these system resources by application processes and execution threads. The extensive set of performance metrics collected is designed to assist system administrators and application developers, both of whom need to understand the impact of their decisions on overall system performance.

For example, the Windows 2000 32-bit application programming interface (the Win32 API) provides a complex set of operating system services for application developers to use, including thread scheduling, process virtual memory management, and file processing. The performance statistics Windows 2000 provides are complementary—they help programmers use these operating system services efficiently. Some applications written ...