Windows Technical question

[andrewducker]

Looking in the Windows Task Manager, at the Performance Tab, I notice that most of the time, what's slowing my machine down isn't a program I'm running - it's something happening in the Kernel. (i.e. it's the red line, not the green one).

Does anyone have any suggestions for what will tell me _what_ in the kernel is taking up processor cycles?  I'd like to know if it's my sound, graphics, disk, or what...

Comments

[aberbotimue.livejournal.com]

event viewer..

you can view cycles by loads of shit

[aberbotimue.livejournal.com]

ecept xp doesmn't have it, does it!

[code-delphi.livejournal.com]

If you haven't come across it already, Sysinternals has an amazing range of truly useful freeware utilities for working out what's going on behind the scenes on a Win32 box. Specifically, Process Explorer is a more sophisticated task manager. I couldn't see how to display kernel/user time in the main window, but it is available in the properties of each process. You could use it to pin down which process(es) are spending too much time in the kernel. Sounds like something a little overly-threaded, which is spending too much time in the kernel context switching. Then again, my experience at that level is on Unix systems, so who knows just how that translates to Win32 (probably reasonably well, but nothing surprises me about Windows anymore).

Best of luck identifying the culprit!

[code-delphi.livejournal.com]

Following up on my previous comment, the PsList command line utility, run with the -x option, dumps all processes and how much each user and kernel time is used by each thread in each process.