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andyhky
Asked: 2010-02-06 09:30:06 +0800 CST

Windows XP - High CPU usage overnight, how to find which process

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I'm interested in finding a tool that will show me what processes are eating my CPU cycles overnight.

Problem: We have nagios configured on a Windows XP machine - it alerts high CPU usage almost every night and I am having difficulty tracking down the offending process(es).

I looekd at Process Explorer from sysinternals, but I don't know how I would run this overnight and still have the information I want.

performance windows-xp

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    you could always run perfmon and capture a log file to look at the next day. Capture all the process data and you will see what the CPU usage is

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  2. Sysinternal tools from Microsoft will help you with that especially Process Explorer. You can probably stay watching how it works or you could try this tool WinTasks 5 which seems to promise CPU logging for up to 24 hours.

    Logging CPU Usage WinTasks 5 Professional is capable of logging CPU usage per process for up to 24 hours, which is more than enough for detecting suspicious processes. WinTasks 5 Professional can also run in the background, continuously logging CPU and memory usage while consuming a minimum of system resources. To decide which processes have been active during the night, you simply launch WinTasks and open the resource statistics window. Set the time scale to 24 hours and look for deviations in the total CPU usage graph. If there are any longer periods of high CPU loads, step through all running processes using the arrow keys to find the processes that were active during that period. This gives you a good starting point for identifying unwanted processes, backdoors, Trojans, and viruses. After identifying the suspicious processes, you can simply search the Internet for the executable files to find out what each process does.

    Seems like WinTasks 5 is out of date thou. You could eventually use Perfmon (builtin feature of Microsoft products). You can find how to do it on microsoft website. It's not as advanced as Vista/7 but it should do the trick.

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  3. Any network-wide AV scans scheduled to run overnight? Backups? Anything else? These are normally good first places to look.

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  4. Process Explorer can do it.

    View > System Information.

    When the process starts hitting high load, simply mouse over the "green" area and it will tell you the .exe file.

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  5. Create a batch file or other type of script to be run when Nagious triggers the alert. Then, using pslist or similar, see what's running at that time. My gut feeling is that it will be an automated process, such as backups, AV scan, defrag, etc.

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