Windows 2008 Performance Monitor – Disk Performance

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We have a Windows 2008 R2 server with SQL installed. We are trying to measure if the disk performance is causing any bottle necks. I've found many suggestions regarding which monitors to use, but am having trouble understanding the results. Each counter uses a different scale and I don't know how that could effect the analysis. This server is hosted and storage is provided by a back end SAN. Are there any good articles that give you a table of what is a good or bad result and what scale the counter should be using for those results?

Thanks You!

Best Answer

Here's one on diskperf, its counters and a description.

And here's its parent chapter on the general topic. It's got some really good sub-sections, for example, Resolving Disk Bottlenecks.

Dropping some general terms (or the names of the counter in question) into Google also yields a plethora of official tehcnnet documentation (and unofficial discussions, as well), so you should have no trouble finding what you're looking for on your own, honestly. I think this one's one of my preferred pages when I need quick run down on precisely what that performance counter actually means, though.

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Windows – How to find what process is holding a file open in Windows

I've had success with Sysinternals Process Explorer. With this, you can search to find what process(es) have a file open, and you can use it to close the handle(s) if you want. Of course, it is safer to close the whole process. Exercise caution and judgement.

To find a specific file, use the menu option Find->Find Handle or DLL... Type in part of the path to the file. The list of processes will appear below.

If you prefer command line, Sysinternals suite includes command line tool Handle, that lists open handles.

Examples

c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "e:\" (finds all files opened from drive e:\"
c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "file-or-path-in-question"

Linux Hard Disk Load – How to Monitor Hard Disk Load on Linux

You can get a pretty good measure of this using the iostat tool.

% iostat -dx /dev/sda 5

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s   rsec/s   wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
sda               0.78    11.03    1.19    2.82    72.98   111.07    45.80     0.13   32.78   1.60   0.64

The disk utilisation is listed in the last column. This is defined as

Percentage of CPU time during which I/O requests were issued to the device (band-width utilization for the device). Device saturation occurs when this value is close to 100%.

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