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Brettski
Asked: 2010-02-23 06:58:38 +0800 CST

Does Performance Monitor create any load on monitored system?

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I have always wondered if there are multiple people monitoring a server using Performance monitor, does this create any type of load on the system? I am not sure where the counters are stored, so if there are ten or fifteen monitors running against a server, will there be any effect?

Edit:
My experience with Performance Monitor does show that the machine running the application will have a slight to moderate performance and memory hit. The scope of this question is remotely monitoring a system, where Performance Monitor is not running on the machine being monitored. Plus, the machine being monitored may have multiple monitors accessing it from different locations. Why you ask, because there are many people in the company monitoring the health of a farm or group of servers.

I haven't really noticed any extra load on monitored systems, though I ask the question to see if anyone else has experienced a load and what the threshold may be.

windows performance-monitoring

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can't observe what's happening without influencing the object being observed to some degree :-)

    But the effect is minimal. Otherwise you'd have had a lot of people complaining about how useless performance monitor is when practically used in the field.

    Edit: The more counters you use, the more overhead it does impose (as from this link). My experiences are that the overhead is usually negligible...if perfmon in normal use can kill your system, you're running on the edge of issues anyway.

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  2. You can reduce the load by running the perfmon on a different machine than the one you're monitoring and using remote counters.

    Also, it may be best to run perfmon on a single machine, rather than have multiple perfmons running against your monitored server. I've never read or experimented with seeing what multiple remote perfmons do to the monitored server, it may be negligible, but it seems odd to me to do it from multiple collectors.

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  3. Well,this depends on the methods you are monitoring the server. If you monitor the performance through bypass mode or span, the effect is minimal. If you monitor the server on itself, it will use the memory and lower the performance of it.

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