How To Use Performance Monitor To Lock For Memory Usage Problems In Windows 7

Description

If you want to know the memory one process is using you have multiple options in Windows 7.

As you know you can see it on the Task Manager but you cannot have a record of what exactly is being used with the Resource Monitor we encounter the same problem.

Performance Monitor is the tool you need, but as many system programs, it has so many options you can be lost on it, so we are going to see a simple example to know how to use it.

Solution

1. Enter on Performance Monitor.

a) Press Windows Key + R.

b) Type perfmon and press enter.

2. In this first post about Performance Monitor, something is telling me I am going to write more,we are going to create a new Data Collector Set.

a) Select Data Collector Sets, User Defined.

b) We select new data collector doing a right-click on the blank pane:

c) Insert a name, I have used Memory and choose create manually.

d) We select create data logs, performance counters as you can see on the next image:

e) Press next so you can configure the counters and the sample interval.

f) Press Add…

g) Look for process and select Working Set – Private, now you can chose what process you want to track and add it.

h) Select page faults per second, press ok and finish.

3. Now we only need to initiate the counter. Right click on the created record set and press start:

When it finishes select stop and then you can see it on the report section.

One of the key questions is why we select page faults per second. Windows, i you don’t know, uses your hard disk to have more memory for processes. If  for example you are using Excel and it starts eating up your RAM memory Windows offers more using  the drives you have installed on the computer.

Maybe it can sound like a good idea sometimes drives to a slow PC because hard disk is thousand times slower than RAM. When Windows need to use the hard disk it counts like a page fault so if page faults per second starts to grow the performance of the entire system can be affected.