Overview of Performance Monitor Server

Server performance is an important issue in a mission-critical business environment. Monitoring and optimizing performance of network servers is one of the administrator’s most important tasks, and it is important to continually collect and analyze performance data to ensure that any problems can be taken care of before they impact end users.

Windows Server 2003 provides administrators with built in tools such as Task Manager and System Monitor (perfmon) for monitoring performance issues and detecting security.

User reported that they are facing sluggish performance on server between 2:00 AM - 5:00 AM.

Configuration of Server as follows.

OS	Windows 2003 Server
RAM	1 GB
Role	Terminal Server
Max Terminal User	18

To monitor Performance of the server, I have set following counter to server.

Memory\Available MBytes Memory\Pages/sec Process(_Total)\Private Bytes Process(_Total)\Working Set Processor(0)\% Processor Time Processor(1)\% Processor Time System\Processor Queue Length Terminal Services\Active Sessions

Here, my concern was to find whether sluggish performance due to High Memory utilization or CPU utilization. Monitored server between 2:00 AM - 5:00 AM then pull the report.

Now to analysis the report, open the file in Excel and create graph respect to Time.

Note: Graph should be respective fields only.

I have created three graphs - Available Memory, CPU utilisation and Pages/S

 As per above graphs,

CPU utilization was only 25 - 30% on both CPU. Most of the Time Available Memory was low.
I have set Pages/Sec to know the ratio of hard page faults and found when available goes low Pages/sec goes higher to satisfy the hard page faults. So, it is very clear sluggish performance is due to Low Available memory.

Solution : Increase of the RAM may resolve the issue.