Hardware Performance Counters
The following table describes the hardware performance counters you should use to diagnose and monitor the performance of your Commerce Server computer. You can find these counters in Microsoft Windows Server System Monitor. You should monitor each server in your data center with performance counters and you should view the results collectively. You can use the counters in the System and Memory objects to monitor capacity.
Performance object |
Counter name |
Description |
|---|---|---|
Network Segment |
Bytes received per second Bytes sent per second |
If a network card approaches its maximum capacity, you should add another card. If this value approaches the capacity of the network, a higher bandwidth network might be necessary. |
Inetinfo Instance (in the Process object) |
Virtual bytes |
Monitor this for memory leaks or size approaching maximum available RAM. This counter measures the virtual memory allocations. |
|
Working set |
This should be well within the hardware capacity you have available, which means less than the physical RAM. |
Memory |
Available bytes |
This should be more than 4 MB. |
|
Pages per second |
This should be less than one page per second. If the system is actually out of memory, this is the biggest indicator of the problem. |
Physical Disk |
Disk Writes/second Disk Reads/second |
Combined, these two counters should be well under the maximum capacity for the disk device. |
|
% Disk Time |
The percentage of elapsed time that the selected disk drive is busy servicing read or write requests. |
SQL Server |
IO transactions/sec |
Indicates how much activity the SQL Server actually performs. |
|
Compiles/sec Recompiles/sec |
Indicates the efficiency of the queries that SQL Server is running. Reducing this number is very important to reducing the CPU load on the SQL Server. |
System |
Context switches/sec |
If this rate is more than 5,000 context switches per CPU, you should add another server to horizontally scale the system. |
|
%Total Processor |
Peak utilization can be 100 percent, but you should not sustain utilization at a level past the capacity of your processor. You can scale all the server elements horizontally. |
Web |
Total connections |
The number of active Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections to the server. |
|
Get requests/sec |
The number of HTTP requests that the server receives. This is the primary indicator of traffic to a Web site. |
|
Non-anonymous users per second |
Tracks the number of authenticated user requests at a site. |
Active Server Pages |
Requests per second |
The rate at which the Active Server Pages (ASP) are processing requests. Includes both successful and failed requests. |
|
Requests executing hardware counter |
The average number of requests running at a time during the sample period. Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 has many threads that can simultaneously process requests. |
|
Request wait time |
This should be very close to zero (less than 100 milliseconds) because this is the period of time a request sits in the queue before it starts processing. You do not want users to experience long wait times to process their checkout transactions. |
|
Requests queued |
There should not be a significant queue except at peak periods. |
Bytes Received Per Second Hardware Counter
Compare the bytes received per second counter to the total bandwidth of your network adapter card to determine whether your network connection is creating a bottleneck. To allow for room for spikes in traffic, you should usually use no more than 50 percent of capacity. If this number is very close to the capacity of the connection, and processor and memory use are moderate, the connection might be a problem.
Requests Executing Hardware Counter
If the number for the Requests executing counter is always greater than one (1), there could be a problem in an ASP page or object that is causing a request to stop responding. If this number is never greater than one, even during peak periods, you might have accidentally left ASP bugging on in your site.