Wrote this several months ago but was too busy to publish :-/

As noted in one of the previous blog post, I will use following terminology:

• "Processor" is a piece of hardware you connect to a socket on the motherboard.
• "Physical Core" is a physical computing unit built into the "Processor".
• "Virtual Core" is a virtual computing unit built on top of "Physical Core" (i.e. HT is ON).
• "CPU" is a computing unit inside the "Processor", either physical or virtual.

After a series of blogs on Windows performance counters and after releasing sysb.ps1 testing/benchmarking framework version 0.9RC (dbt2-0.37.50.10) I set out to eliminate some unknowns from the testing. First to tackle …

Welcome to the final blog in Windows PerfCounters and Powershell series and sorry for the delay. The purpose of this blog is to explain the inner workings of top-script.ps1 script and practical usage of Performance counters on Windows through Powershell. It is intended for people who want Linux top - like tool on Windows.

The script is a part of and available in our existing benchmarking package (dbt2-0.37.50.10) developed by Mikael Ronstrom.

On Top:If you ever did benchmarking on Linux or simply wondered "where did all my resources go", top is your best friend. Since this post is not about Linux, you can google "Linux top explained" for more details.


On Performance counters:To learn about Windows PerfCounters, please refer to my previous …

I had an interesting task of collecting and displaying some runtime metrics during the benchmark. Since data was clearly divided between OS and processes, I opted for separate background jobs in which case no task will stall the other. However, this means I had to establish communication between main script code and jobs which is tricky in Powershell (see this bug for example). Immediately, I thought of using named pipes or files (as I do have small, ever changing set of data). Further investigation revealed 4 ways of accomplishing this:

1. Using files

• pros:
  • Tried and tested; works everywhere.
  • Intuitive.
  • File management routines are mature.
• …

Pipe viewer is a command line tool which is used to monitor the throughput, display the estimated time of completion or to limit the transfer rate of a pipe (pipeline).

Install pipe viewer on Debian / Ubuntu with the following command.

apt-get install pv

On CentOS / Fedora / RedHat use the yum command to install pipe viewer

yum install pv

To use pipe viewer just insert the pv command between two processes to monitor the throughput of the pipe.

cat logfile.log.1 | pv | gzip -9 > logfile.log.1.gz
9,18MB 0:00:01 [ 9,1MB/s] [   <=>

Or limit the transfer rate of the pipe to a designated number of bytes.

cat logfile.log.1 | pv --rate-limit 100 | gzip -9 > logfile.log.1.gz
 300B 0:00:03 [ 101B/s ] [         <=>                                    ]

Related Posts:

• …

It”s not the most common task in the world, but you might want to view processes from a particular user and once in a while you might even need to kill processes from a single user, be it during an attack or because you simply got a bug in an application bombarding your db server with connections!

Here is a small stored procedure which does exactly that!

call process_list("show","username","hostname");

– shows all processes owned by username@hostname

call process_list("kill","username","hostname");

– kills all processes owned by username@hostname

The code for this stored procedure can be found below. If you have any comments / suggestions feel free to comment below.

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