Task Manager The Performance Monitor helps you track problems over time, but what can you do about problem processes in real time? The Task Manager provides mechanisms to monitor and resolve performance problems in real time For example, say you have a hunch that a particular exe is your system's CPU hog To activate the Task Manager, press Ctrl+Alt+Del and click Task Manager Alternatively, you can run taskmgr.exe from the command line or right-click at the bottom of the bar and select Task Manager After you start this tool, you can view numerous columns of performance data on the Processes tab The amount of data available on Windows 2000's Task Manager Processes tab is much greater than the amount on NT 4.0's Task Manager Processes tab—in particular, finer-grain I/O information is available on a per-process basis (for example, I/O reads, I/O writes) Within the Processes view, you can quickly determine what amount of CPU, memory, and disk resources each process is consuming The Applications tab lets you see which processes or applications are not responding To find out whether a particular exe is your system's CPU hog, select the Processes image name column to place the process list in alphabetical order This action simplifies finding the culprit exe After you find the filename, highlight it by clicking it, then right-click it Task Manager presents you with several system control options End process: If the process isn't crucial, you can select this option and stop the process This action might let another critical process get CPU time and operate properly End process tree: Some processes have multiple threads that might act independently You can select this option to bring your system under control Set priority: You can select this option if you don't want to kill the process, but you want it to have less CPU time Lowering the priority level of a process lowers the process's access to CPU cycles Set affinity: This option is available only on multi-CPU systems You can select this option to bind an application to a specific CPU or set of CPUs to manage CPU usage For example, if you have four, and one application is hogging all four, you can restrict the application to only one CPU so that other applications can use the freed resources You can lower regsvc.exe's priority by selecting Set Priority, BelowNormal, as Figure 23.3 illustrates Figure 23.4 shows how you can monitor the CPU and memory utilization using Task Manager Figure 23.3 Setting the priority Figure 23.4 CPU memory and usage ... Set affinity: This option is available only on multi-CPU systems You can select this option to bind an application to a specific CPU or set of CPUs to manage CPU usage For example, if you have four, and one application is hogging all... example, if you have four, and one application is hogging all four, you can restrict the application to only one CPU so that other applications can use the freed resources You can lower regsvc.exe's priority by selecting Set Priority, BelowNormal, as Figure 23.3 illustrates... BelowNormal, as Figure 23.3 illustrates Figure 23.4 shows how you can monitor the CPU and memory utilization using Task Manager Figure 23.3 Setting the priority Figure 23.4 CPU memory and usage